N=1

2011-11-07T07:53:00.000-06:00

"It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone." William Gibson

“Content is always shaped by the container.” Robert Tercek

"Productive paranoia is the ability to be hyper-vigilant about potentially bad events that can hit your company and then turn that fear into preparation and clearheaded action." Morten T. Hansen

Today's image: Afternoon sun by Fred Winston. Great shot. Thanks for sharing.

Welcome to the countdown. The waning days of 2011. The stage setting days which serve as the 2012 prologue. All the best to you, may you deliver your 2011 numbers and then some.

My thought is these are some of the most important issues for 2012. They deserve your attention, consideration, study, discussion and critical thinking. Thereafter, decisive action is required.

Mobile
Social
Cloud
HTML5
Data
Real-time
Revenue development
Metrics (Related: Dashboard Design)
Talent

In the coming weeks I'll blog about each issue.

On mobile, let me suggest too few media properties have made the investment required to create a solid mobile version of their website. In 2012, this is no longer optional, it's not a luxury or a nice-to-have, a mobile version of your site will be required for you to stay competitive. Having an app is fine, however, it is simply not a substitute for a great mobile version of your site.

This past week, Google began asking if you're "READY TO GO MO?" They've launched a mobile initiative that you may use to learn more about what it takes to be mobile-friendly and you may also test your site's mobility, here.

Believing it important to eat my own dog food, I was able, with Google's help, to launch the mobile version of N=1 this past summer.

Wanted: leadership in sales innovation and revenue development. Two recent exhibits of the ongoing revenue crisis in both donation-supported and ad-supported media. This round, it's broadcast television, public and commercial.

In harm's way: Ebert Presents At The Movies. Roger Ebert writes "Unless we find an angel, our television program will go off the air at the end of its current season. There. I've said it. Usually in television, people use evasive language. Not me. We'll be gone. I want to be honest about why this is. We can't afford to finance it any longer." The show is cleared in all of the top 50 markets by public stations. Affiliates get the show for free. It's produced at WTTW in Chicago and distributed by American Public Television (APT). The catch? Roger is the only source of funding. They have been unable to attract the underwriting needed to cover costs. Tragic. Read Roger's column, here.

Sales Couldn't Sell "The Simpsons" by Fred Jacobs via jacoBLOG

Bonus: Radio programming ace, Mark Edwards blogs about the first tribe of wireless. Is Local Radio Dead? In Some Ways It Is, But Owners Don't Know It Yet, here

2011-10-31T05:30:00.000-05:00

"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." Naguib Mahfouz

"Scientists are explorers, philosophers are tourists." Richard Feynman

"Stay hungry. Stay foolish." Steve Jobs

Today's image: Wet Tracks by Thomas Hawk. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

Happy Halloween! During my annual the doc told me I had to lay off the boos.

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

With thanks to Carole King, let me suggest that in the massive, ongoing sea change that is digital disruption, few of us are staying in one place anymore. Consider this proffer: Your media consumption, your behavior, will be as different five years from today as your behavior today is from what it was ten years ago. Your media production, your acts of creation and those of everyone have been assisted, enabled in truly profound ways.

Let's take one of the moving parts: social networks. Facebook and Twitter are first generation platforms. Both have made a significant impact. Both enjoy global reach. Both are building a business, a brand, without the need to invest resources in traditional marketing channels (i.e., advertising). In fact, ad-supported measured media have been the aggressive, albeit unpaid, promotional partners of both. "We all need to spend more time on Facebook" opined Tom Webster, Edison Research's Vice President, Strategy and Marketing (and their resident social scholar). Of course, Tom's right. Last week, Jacob Media's Lori Lewis and Fred Jacobs issued a clarion call about social, Time Suck: "...it's time to adapt to a multi-channel environment and study the motivations behind each channel. Or simply get left behind..."

Nobody stays in one place anymore.

Occasionally I hear from folks kind enough to ask me why I'm not blogging any longer. It's a fair question given 200+ posts a year appeared in this space during 2006, 2007 and 2008. Recent years not so much. 54 posts in 2009, 13 in 2010 and, with this, 8 posts so far this year. The quick answer is I'm still sharing my thoughts but not in this one place anymore. For example, 3 years, 7 months and 15 days ago I began posting on Twitter. My guess is I'm sharing far more on Twitter than I was ever able to share here because I can tweet a real-time link to something just read. Moreover, I can do that on the fly without my laptop or desk top via a hand-held device. The sense of time and space has changed dramatically in recent years.

This is not to suggest blogs are dead or on the way out. Nonsense. My take: there are more and better blogs than there have ever been and I have a reader full of unread posts to prove it. The signal to noise ratio is also greatly improved because our tuning tools are better. As Nathan Jurgenson wrote just yesterday "Social media is like radio: It all depends on how you tune it." [Why Chomsky is wrong about Twitter] My sense is there's nothing wrong with the fire hose. Shirky was right. What we have is a filter problem.

Some might say I have over-shared on Twitter. 36,396 tweets and counting. Guilty, not every tweet has been a gem worthy of a retweet. Let me also say I love to blog and will continue to use this space to share thoughts that require more space and time. This blog isn't dead, yet. It has simply become only one of the places where I'm living out loud. Humblebrag: I'm told my smiling clown Twitter account ranks 107,373 out of the 10,999,157 scored by grader.com so I'm closing in on breaking into the exclusive five figures club.

While I'm not able to comment on the veracity of such rankings or grades, it's interesting to note Grader's Top 100 Twitter Elite includes only three American media outlets. Fox News at #14. Huffington Post Washington bureau at #18. New York Times at #76. The list is dominated by individuals. This seems to hold true across DMA after DMA. Media, broadcasters especially, should be doing a much better job. Congrats to Thomas Clifford, my Twitter pal from Appleton, Wisconsin. He's ranked #9 and lives by the motto "Find out what sucks and don't do that."

Want to gain solid insight into the emergent metrics of social? In my experience, the go-to-guy on social media data is the aforementioned Tom Webster. You may find his blog, brandsavant, here.

Doing business in 2011 without having some kind of personal digital presence (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blog) is equivalent to trying to do business in 1990 without a telephone number or fax machine or claiming you're competitive in business ten years ago without having an email account. Table stakes. What's changing is not only the cost of doing business but the resources required to be and stay competitive in business. New devices are also changing consumer behaviors. Example: Amazon is offering a tablet which, it may be argued, is a personalized point of sale device. The prospective impacts of social commerce are magnitudes of net force larger than the changes brought about so far by today's nascent social networks.

Identity is being redefined

Who are you on the web? Used to be having email was enough. Now, Facebook, Google, Twitter and players to be named, are in a battle to own the so-called identity space. Twitter, being asymmetrical, gained an early edge over symmetrical Facebook but Zuck changed it up adding the asymmetric feature "Subscribe." It's the Wild West, no standards yet for "social authentication." It's an important issue. Stay tuned.

It's the dawn of this digital disruption. The best is yet to come. My suggestion is we'll look back on 2011 someday soon and laugh about how lame, crude all of these early platforms really were. But in the meantime, in between time, the conversation is happening with or without you so it's important to get into the game. Now more than ever, your assets must be digital, discoverable and ready to share. Be yourself. Have fun. Share.

Another example of being in more than one place. This is a must-read not shared here last month but via my posterous. Speaking at Social Media Week - Chicago, the great media critic Robert Feder said...

"...It's about engaging the reader and that's one aspect of it but it's an important part of the new media and the world that we're in and that didn't happen in old media, that didn't happen at the Sun-Times. We wrote our piece, we went home, that was it. It was a monologue delivered and that was the end of the process...people, younger people in particular, are engaged in all media they consume and that includes news and journalism and they want to be able to react, they want to be able to use it in different ways, and that's what we're affording them the opportunity to do. I'm just setting the table, I'm starting the conversation every day and what happens out there is up to the people who read it."

Emphasis above (bold) mine. Robert speaks of a fundamental change. From delivering a monologue to starting a conversation. The difference is engagement. Once upon a time print writers heard from readers when readers had taken the time to call or write a letter to them or the editor. Letters, delivered a day or so after, may or may not have been edited and published. We didn't get to read the mail of the newspaper writer. Today we do and find it odd if the ability to comment fails to follow an online writing.

Robert offered many interesting and important points during his talk, here's another:

To me, you should never take your eye off the quality of the content, that's what matters

The play's the thing. It was ever thus. Read more excerpts from Robert's thought-provoking appearance, here.

Refresh: The People Formerly Known as the Audience, written by Jay Rosen in the summer of 2006, deserves a fresh reading, here.

Cool, new, on: findings chime.in Pinterest

Bonus: Patrick LaForge on the new "Generation Gap" via Google+, here

Video: "Studies show that sketching and doodling improve our comprehension - and our creative thinking. Sunni Brown makes the case for unlocking your brain via pad and pen." I highly recommend her book, Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers [Amazon info]

2011-09-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

"It's part of the mythology surrounding the music business that spending huge amounts of marketing monies will ensure commercial success. This simply isn't so. If the music isn't compelling from the audience's perspective, no amount of spending will make it a hit." Al Teller

"The thing most people want is genuine understanding. If you can understand the feelings and moods of another person, you have something fine to offer." Paul Brock

"The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction and malperformance." Peter Drucker

Today's image: da rieslings by Fred Winston. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

A great interview with Al Teller. Al talks about the past, present and future of the music business. Teller started in the record industry as an assistant to the legendary Clive Davis. He went on to head labels including UA, Columbia, CBS and MCA. My thanks to Ian Rogers, host of This Week in Music, for sharing the video.

2011-09-17T13:53:00.000-05:00

"Amateurs hope; professionals work." Garson Kanin

"Winning isn't everything, but wanting to win is." Vince Lombardi

"Before it can be solved, a problem must be clearly stated and defined." William Feather

Today's image: The Open Road by Trey Ratcliff. Beautiful shot. Thanks for sharing.

A video and a good read.

The new Geoffrey Moore, Escape Velocity: Free Your Company's Future from the Pull of the Past, is topical and a great follow-on to his earlier writings. [Amazon info]

2011-09-05T22:10:00.036-05:00

"What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility - that is, what a product does for him." Peter Drucker

"Life is pretty simple. You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is in doing something else." - Tom Peters

"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." - Andrew Lewis

Today's image: Hey! by Fred Winston. Great shot. Thanks for sharing.

Welcome to September.

As we begin both the last frenetic drive to make our numbers before the 2011 clock runs out and the ritual dance that is the annual budget process, some loose ends for your consideration. As always, your thoughts are welcome.

Start playing the game thinking ahead
two moves or more

Critical thinking and serious listening continue to provide exceptional yields. Paul Drew often said planning afforded the best possible ROI. He was spot-on. Putting scenario planning and game theory to work are but two solid options. Let's begin by asking the important question...

What if?

What if transactional business died?

Spots and dots represent the single most important revenue engine of the broadcast trade but what if, without notice, transactional revenues precipitously declined?

We must ask such prescient questions.

I'm reminded of that famous speech at the 1975 NARM, The Day Radio Died delivered by the gifted Stan Cornyn, then a senior Warner Brothers executive. As it happened, Stan had asked exactly the right question at precisely the wrong time (the record industry, being in high cotton, dismissed his provocative thought experiment).

It's critical that we play ahead.

Here's a practical example deserving discussion: How are we going to optimize political in 2012 and what's our strategy for beating those numbers in 2013 without that cyclical gift? Importantly, what if political allocated to broadcast is reduced or doesn't come back at all in the 2014 midterm or the 2016 federal? Isn't this a perfect time to entertain the notion that an RAB/TvB led task force be established to work these cycles? From K Street to every campaign headquarters, PAC and all of the political consulting firms there are stories to be told, value propositions to evangelize and champion.

On the day job we were criticized some years ago for daring to ask "What if?" Specifically, when the automotive category went south we initiated conversations grounded in the brutal candor of fresh circumstance. We began asking "What if it doesn't come back? What if it does come back and the dollars are shifted, less broadcast and more other including interactive? How then do we compete?" The situation was indeed tragic. Some long established car stores, the majority perennial broadcast clients, closed forever. Time spent in scenario planning paid off. Our clients paced ahead the next two years having developed strategies to replace 60% or more of their local, zone and national auto spend (i.e., dealer, association, factory dollars). Moreover, we developed new strategies and tactics for auto to more effectively employ broadcast and in that process totally reimagined and rebooted the category.

What if your transactional business died? What exactly is your strategy for staying in business? The exercise is important. Rather than wasting time in a hypothetical "losing it all next year" discussion let's first imagine 2012 as the year transactional is off by 12%, your attrition rate doubles, your DSO adds 10 more days and you lose both your top seller and your DOS. What's your plan to deliver your numbers? Ask "What would have to happen?" for us to make our numbers given a set of specific conditions (ninjas of finance call such probabilistic conditions "assumptions"). Using worst-case scenarios can be productive if they are not simply possible but also credible.

We must embrace the simple reality that transactional is, in essence, a commodity business. As such, this segment of media spend is more likely than not to move away from personal selling and into the more efficient realm of machine trading. The strategic issue here is how do we optimize participation in this commodity trading process and at the same time develop a separate sales organization focused on selling solutions rather than numbers? How do we move from responding to an avail to working with clients in a creative collaboration to produce results? We have an urgent need to do both.

Sidebar: During my time with CBS Mel Karmazin asked me to consider putting Howard Stern on one of our Dallas stations. Howard was not cleared in the market at the time. One of my first thoughts was "What happens if the airplane goes down?" Experience had taught me that the best time to look for talent was before you needed them. Fast forward. Howard announces he's leaving and suddenly at risk are ratings at a bunch of stations and what has been estimated to be about 100 million in CBS billing. It became clear there had been no serious succession planning prior to Howard's announcement. History records this as a fire drill where people were sent into the burning buildings.

As the proverb says: The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today. Mind the wise counsel of Tom Peters "The trick is in doing something else." Let's get to work.

The major advances in civilization are processes
that all but wreck the societies in which they occur
Alfred North Whitehead

Bonus: Erik Sass provides an interesting overview of what's happening and not happening in American advertising. Winners and Losers: The Changing Media Ad Landscape, 1980 -2011, here.

Flashback: The challenges faced by music radio today simply demand the aggressive employment of innovation and creativity. N=1, August, 2004.

2011-07-27T12:32:00.017-05:00

Martin Atkins

"It's not a problem if 20,000 people 'illegally' download your music. It's a problem if they don't."

"There are no airbags in the music industry. When it goes wrong YOUR head is going through the windshield."

"Technical proficiency is a dead-end. There will always be someone better. Instead focus on diversifying your skill set."

All three of our quotes today are from Martin Atkins. Martin, an accomplished entrepreneur, is a celebrated musician, author and teacher that we can all learn something from. As it happens, you can download his most recent book for free, here (offer expires October 31, 2011). Let me also encourage you to read Greg Kot's article SXSW 2011: Martin Atkins throws blueberry muffins at music industry via Chicago Tribune, here.

What's new about news: Michael Rosenblum offers his latest post on what's not happening in the 6:30 news wars. Why TV News is so VERY TERRIBLE (and why ratings keep dropping), here.

Good read: Insights with Sir Martin Sorrell by Simon Rogers. From Google's latest Think Quarterly, The Innovation issue - here - other good reads also in this issue, worth the jump.

Bravos: GMail team, very clever and a solid initiative to prompt Google account signups. Email intervention.

Google+ tumblr and Spotify are three of this summer's biggest hits. You may find me on g+ via my Google Profile link (in the left column of this page). NEW: started a blog about Google+, here.

Bonus: Kevin Kelly is suggesting the future of the internet can be reduced to six verbs.

Screening

Interacting

Sharing

Flowing

Accessing

Generating

My sense is Kevin's thesis is spot-on and simply brilliant. The following video of Kevin's NExTWORK talk about those six verbs is well worth your bandwidth. Bravos to kk.

Where ever attention flows

money will follow

2011-06-25T10:48:00.014-05:00

"The 'best' investment you can make isn't gold. It's the people you love, the dreams you have, and living a life that matters." Umair Haque

[Is content king?] “I don’t agree with that...I think it sends you down the wrong track. I’d say the emphasis is on relevance and usefulness. The danger with the content story is — the most powerful thing you could do to me as a brand if I went to [a music festival] is you could chill my beer for me. If you pursue ‘content,’ you won’t come up with that idea. And if you go to the airport and get power from Nokia or Sony, that’s much more meaningful to me as a brand. I think content steers you away from that. I think content is a subset of that, if it’s relevant and useful. But the more fundamental thing is for brands to have a meaningful relationship and engagement with their audience.” Carl Johnson

"The change in the Web’s direction is a clear indication to me that we aren’t just in the midst of a boom for new interaction modes, but rather in a generational overhaul of the Internet." Ben Elowitz

Today's image: Light in the kitchen on a warm Virginia morning by Earl Gray. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

Please let me suggest you click on the link following each quote above. Each, and all, is a good read. It's a beautiful day here in flyoverland. All the best to you, enjoy your summer!

Bonus: How to make a clock run for 10,000 years. A great read, here.

2011-05-17T00:04:00.030-05:00

"The whole point of any medium, where it is video or writing or painting or film is to expand our thinking and expose us to new ideas, not repeat the same ones over and over ad infinitum...Tell me what I don't know. Tell me what I never even thought about before." Michael Rosenblum

" For it to be a content business, content people have to run the company. The business has to be obsessed with what it’s consumers want and be able to give them that and much more. In fact then need to give them things that they didn’t know they wanted. Content consumers ultimately need to be surprised and fully expect their sources of information to be smarter than they are about the topics they are reading or viewing." Larry Kramer

"It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them." Eric Schmidt

Today's image: Leaning Tulip by Fred Winston. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

Let's suppose you launched a business in November of 2008 and in April of 2010 your business had achieved a value of approx $1.35 billion. Let us say your revenues that Spring were on pace to make $1 billion in sales faster than any other business in history. Let's agree that in October of 2010 your business was operating in over 150 markets in the USA, over 100 markets in Europe, Asia and South America and you had over 35 million registered users.

Now...
What if?

What if in the Fall of 2010 you were offered $3 billion to sell that business and then weeks later you're approached by another suitor who offers you over $5 billion to sell?

What if your 2011 projections indicated you were in good shape, pacing to deliver between $3 and $4 billion in revenues. Would you dare change anything?

It's the true story of Groupon and here's how they've answered those two what if questions...

They said no. They were not interested in selling (Yahoo! and Google were the rumored buyers)

and

They decided while business was good it was time to change things, invent another product and introduce a different business model.

Imagine that.

A company that's about two and a half years old which is on track to produce revenue equal to about 21% of US radio's total revenue in 2010 (using BIA/Kelsey estimate of $14.1 bil, and $3 bil rev assumption for Groupon) and instead of being laser focused on tweaking and optimizing their existing business model they've decided to also change up their own game, innovate and launch another business.

Before you continue reading, please watch the following video.

Clearly, Groupon and its competitors (over 100 similar US sites) are having an impact on local ad spending.

Allow me to suggest that Groupon Now has the potential of changing the local direct game yet again because its value proposition is fundamentally different. Groupon is putting the third screen to work and doing it in real-time, they've entered the brave new world of the mobile pure play.

"Mobile is huge for Groupon...I believe we could see us doing 50 percents of deals sold/purchased in the next couple of years" said Michael Shim, Groupon VP Mobile Partnerships. As eMoney writer Tricia Duryee reports "Mobile, along with social and local, will be one of the largest drivers for Groupon's deals business over the next few years...Shim said the service has also exceeded expectations, with more than 1,000 merchants already signed up to offer real-time deals. 'We’ve been inundated with demand. Groupon Now is about local discovery. What can I find around me?…We are just getting going on where we think it will take our business.'" [ref]

Introduced last week and more than 1,000 merchants already signed up. Pop quiz: what's your best take rate story? Is it a compelling one-sheet being used on the street and on your site?

My sense is there are strategic issues involved. Here are four to consider.

1. The practical notion of "Local" is being redefined. We're moving from the traditional big/generalized (e.g., DMA, SMSA, US Census block code) to the new small/personalized (think GPS or exact position within three meters). A new marketing grammar, a new sense of place, will be one of the second or third-order effects in the growing adoption of location-based services.

2. New players want in, others want bigger local shares. Local has not been 100% owned and operated by the usual suspects (i.e., the traditional incumbents including print, broadcast and out of home) for a while now but it's getting ever more competitive. Local and hyper-local is where everyone wants to be next. Everyone includes Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Pandora, and [insert the name of an advertising or ad-supported company here].

3. New rules of engagement are emerging and with them new expectations are being created. The metrics used in buying and evaluating local media will likely change and affect some share of local ad spend. From buys based upon audience estimates and proof of performance (run as ordered?) to registered users and completed transactions (products/services sold). Moreover, performance pressure will increase. From flights evaluated over days and weeks to flights evaluated over hours in real-time. In this new always-on connected world it's certainly possible that price and item copy will be placed, judged on actual in-the-moment purchase behaviors. Impulse purchasing is exploited, solutions defaulting to mobile (i.e., Help, I'm hungry or I'm bored). As ever, the research tool preferred by local retailers continues to be the cash register.

4. Creating awareness without generating completed transactions will become less and less attractive to buyers, especially those local merchants provided more performance-based options. Branding or pure image driven advertising will become more difficult to justify. John Wanamaker gets credit for the famous adage "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half" but as AdWeek's Michael Wolff wrote just yesterday on the subject of digital marketing and TV's upfront week "...15 years into our ability to measure the absolute effectiveness of the way and the methods by which we sell something, and, still, TV advertising, which measures nothing, guarantees no sales, offers no data, registers no interest, quantifies no desire, provides no follow-up, and which no sentient being watches anyway, is making more money than ever before. Waste works." [ref]

While I appreciate Michael's point of view there remains major work to be done on the metrics used in the buying and selling of digital media. Serious debate continues and we have yet to reach a consensus relative to accepted definitions and measures. Bravos to IAB for their ongoing efforts. Further, while Steve Jobs continues using TV to sell his iPhones and iPads I'll remain bullish on the potential of TV advertising done right. We'll stipulate here that doing TV right is not at all easy and most don't do it right, however, Apple stands out as a good example of just how powerful TV advertising can be. Target, the merchant, is another exemplary TV advertiser. There is, imo, a significant share of the $65.9 billion in annual US TV ad spend [2010 cit] that is pure waste.

"At every crossroads on the path that leads
to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men
to guard the past."
Maurice Maeterlinck

What's a broadcaster to do?

To those working in radio, those progeny of the first generation wireless, the true real-time media pioneers, let me offer five suggestions. As well, let me encourage you to share your thoughts, ideas and suggestions via comments here below.

1. Game it up. At your next sales meeting, play the Groupon Now! video and give sellers the following homework assignment. "How do we pitch Big Frank? What is our value proposition that will blow Big Frank's face off? How will we help him to fill his empty tables?" Make it a pitch competition. On pitch day encourage brutally candid discussion. Vote first, second and third place winners. Let the sales team and a good representation of staff not on the sales team participate in the voting. For those already deep into "Deal of the Day" and other discount coupon strategies, how are you measuring up? Would Big Frank buy your offer over Groupon Now? Do you have a video that demonstrates how your program works? A video that clearly articulates value that the prospective client can understand? Does your value proposition match or exceed the one offered in the Groupon Now video? You must have and present a compelling, engaging story. Remember Leo Burnett's counsel on great advertising being three messages: "Here's what we've got. Here's what it will do for you. Here's how to get it."

2. Work your network. Start a serious conversation with others. What's happening with Groupon, LivingSocial, et al in your market and others? What are your colleagues (and clients) hearing, learning and doing? What's the RAB's best thinking on this? Take the advice of Dr. Jeffrey Cole and ensure that your learning curve is consistently steeper than your action curve. "You have to be paying attention, learning and watching." Do your homework. Be prepared for your client's phone call asking you "What do you know about Groupon?"

3. Make something happen. Get in the game. Take measured action and experiment. Be willing to fail and learn how to fail faster. Be agile. Embrace iterative development. Take the winner of your pitch competition (see #1 above) for a test drive. Carefully study the results. Revisit your design and fine-tune or blow up and move on to your second place winner. Repeat. Move on to your third place winner. Hold another pitch competition.

4. Give your team a better chance to win. Be the best that radio can be. The anecdotal evidence would suggest 7 of every 8 potential merchant deals are rejected by Groupon. Can you imagine a radio sales manager failing to approve 7 out of 8 orders for new business? Even if it turns out not to be true let's admit it...7 of every 8 being rejected makes a killer urban ad legend for Groupon. If what Groupon is doing is working it's working, in part, because they do qualify their clients and work within a creative framework designed to optimize performance on the Groupon platform. Radio should consider taking a more pro-active, aggressive approach in working with clients to develop creative that plays into radio's inherent strengths and utilize smart scheduling of that creative to maximize the chances of producing best results for the client.

5. Check out what Fred Jacobs and the digital ninjas of Jacobs Media have to say about all of this. They're offering a good read. Make the jump to the always informative jacoBLOG here.

Keep in mind Groupon was Andrew Mason's second attempt at using the platform he developed. His first, ThePoint, failed to produce the results he expected but he didn't give up, he moved on to invent Groupon. Now he's inventing Groupon 2.0 What's your team up to?

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett

Footnote: What did Google really want? My guess is Google - if they really did make an offer - already having the superior tech skills, wanted Groupon's creative staff and their local sales team. It would have been a very savvy accretive acquisition in their local strategy. They have since launched Google Offers.

Previously: My post about Groupon from late last year: Nobody likes it but the audience.

Finally, a must-see video and a book recommendation. Thanks for stopping by.

Bonus: TED: Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles."

Recommended:

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser.
Amazon info.

Reviewed by Jesse Walker: The Facebook Friend in the Plastic Bubble

2011-05-07T20:42:00.007-05:00

"The true test of being comfortable with someone else is the ability to share silence." Frank Tyger

"There must always be some advantage on one side or the other, and it is better that advantage should be had by talents than by chance." Samuel Johnson

"The ability to have our own way, and at the same time convince others they are having their way, is a rare thing among men. Among women, it is as common as eyebrows." Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Today's image: The unknown bud by Fred Winston. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

A beautiful Spring day here in Madison. Today I'd like to share a video and my notes of a keynote session from last month's ad:tech SF 2011 conference. As readers of this blog are aware, I am a big fan of Dr. Jeffrey Cole. Simply put, he's brilliant. Dr. Cole is Director of Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School. The video of his keynote, available via YouTube using the following link, is a must-see. Trends, Fads & Transformation: The Impact of the Internet.

Following are my notes from the keynote which are by no means complete and should not be considered a substitute for watching Jeff's performance which is, indeed, a tour de force.

---------------------------

Your learning curve must be much steeper
than your action curve.
You have to be paying attention, learning and watching.

We lost a great opportunity in the 1940s understanding the impact of television. We are undertaking the study of the Internet that should have been conducted on television in the late 1940s. Digital is going to be far more important than television. Eleven years ago began the massive project, tracking of digital, first the web and now mobile that should have been conducted with television in the 1940s. Started in the US now covering 35 countries around the world. For eleven years now we've gone back to the same people year after year. Watching as non-users moved to dialup, as dialup users went to broadband, we watch as 2% drop off the web each year and want to know who are the people who leave and why and more importantly do they return and if so when and what brings them back. Eleven years in we continue to track the never users and want to know how the people who have never been online do things in a world where most of us are online.

Highlights. What we've found over the last eleven years.

Schedules have almost disappeared. The old way. Newspapers - once a day. Having to wait 24 hours for an update doesn't work anymore. How up to the moment does a newspaper online have to be? The answer is thirty to sixty seconds. Music used to have one of the most formalized schedules of any medium. Artists would produce about forty minutes worth of music, (about 12 songs) and release in a cycle of about every 18-24 months. For some people this never worked. Prince is an example. There was no way to release ten albums a year. Today we are waiting for the new model. TV was on such a schedule that the greatest success in the history of magazine publishing - TV Guide - came from a magazine that listed what was on television.

There are too many choices. In 1975, in the average American city, most of us had seven television channels, 90% of viewing was on three - ABC, CBS and NBC. Thirty years later, most markets had well over one hundred channels and 90% of viewing was on six or seven channels. You give people infinitely more choice and we only move out or branch out a little bit. Restaurants owners know that. 20 page menus frustrate people. They can't make choices, there's too much to choose from. Most people in a restaurant want eight to ten choices. Enough choices to feel they can actually make a choice but not so many that they're overwhelmed. On the web 90% of Internet time is spent in 15 places and all the other millions of places account for less than 10% of our Internet time. We're overwhelmed by choice.

All media will survive, but most will be smaller players in a digital era.

The Film Business

Been shrinking for a long time. It's high point was in the 1930s and 40s before the introduction of television. This year film has experienced its most serious decline in a very long time, film attendance so far this year is down 20%. Hollywood is looking at economic factors but is settling on the fact that it's probably the quality of films. DVDs which kept the film industry afloat during much of the 21st century are disappearing and not coming back. DVDs will be gone in four years as everything moves into the cloud. Movie theaters have been seriously overbuilt, many/most will close or convert, become smaller but remain important. A war is brewing between the studios and the theaters. Studios want to release films on the day they're released to home video as well as into the theaters. Theater owners can't catch a break. Studios now want to take films that have been in the theaters for two months and make them available on home video. Theater owners said if they do that they won't run trailers for any of the studios. At the same time as we're seeing film move closer into the home and the distinction between the home screen and the film screen is getting shorter and narrower and the quality of the sets is getting bigger. Theater owners are about to experience another serious problem. Historically, business model gave major share (80-90%) of box office to studios in first weeks of showing, share to theater owners increased becoming majority in later weeks. Most films are out of theaters now within three weeks. In a typical year of 52 weeks, 40 different films will have been number one. With the exception of Avatar we have not seen a film in the last five years that has been number one more than three weeks in a row. With declining share of box office revenues theater owners were hiking up the cost of refreshments. The minute calories counts are required on movie theater food the game is over. A large popcorn and a Coke is about 1,600 calories. Power: those who create good content. The old adage "Content is King" is true.

Music Industry (or what's left of it)

What it takes to be #1. It used to take selling 15 million copies of an album to be number one, last year the number one selling album of the year, Eminem's Recovery, sold 3.4 million copies. Digital in the next three years will pass the CD sources of revenue. CDs will disappear. Digital only platform in 5 years. Music becomes supplemental, becoming the place you get familiar with the music, an ancillary market to the real money in touring, merchandising, advertising. Cloud new home. Power: everyone. Consumer, artist, everybody except the music company.

Book "Publishing"

Long before the Internet, per capita sales have been pitiful for a generation. To get on the New York Times best-seller list out of a country of 300 million people you have to sell 15 to 20 thousand copies of a book. We are not a country of book-reading people. 50% of us buy zero books a year. And of the 50% of us who buy books 70% of them buy one or two books a year. Books are bought by a small minority. Amazon last year now makes more revenue from its digital sales than from its hard cover sales. "Books" will survive but we'll pay a very precious premium to own. We will own few (30 to 40) and pay a lot. Beautiful, expensive books the new reality. Self-publishing which used to be a necessity for some people who couldn't get their books published and used to be low rent and no status now looks like a smart business choice. Power: Authors.

Newspapers

Teenage habit broken. We know thirty years ago teenagers didn't read newspapers but started to when they got into their 20s and 30s. Today they don't read newspapers and the evidence is clear, they never will. When Internet penetration gets to 30% offline newspaper sales begin to decline. 30% is the line that changes everything. India, where internet penetration is at 15% newspaper sales are skyrocketing. By the time they get to 30 they will begin to decline. The sad truth for newspapers is every time a newspaper reader dies he or she is not being replaced by a new reader. In America, newspapers have less than five years remaining. In 1900 we had 600 communities that had two or more newspapers. Today we have six that have two or more newspapers. Instead of counting down the two newspapers towns, we are now counting up the no newspaper towns. Power: Global Players. Examples: New York Times - growth last ten years has been outside of New York not inside of New York. Wall Street Journal. Washington Post. Four or five "global" American voices.

The iPad: Transformational Remarkable device. It's been out a year and no one has really caught up with Apple. Apple has moved the goal post before the other teams have even taken the field. The one thing that absolutely boggles the mind is "I turn it on and one second later I'm working. There's no three or four minute boot. That one out of ten times produces the blue screen of death" Keep in mind newspapers and magazines were never going to do very well on the internet until now because the internet was a "lean forward experience." Nobody wants to lean forward and read a newspaper. They might read an article in the newspaper. Jeff Bezos figured out that if people were going to read books electronically it had to be in the same environment they actually read books, leaning back, in bed, in the bathtub, he created the Kindle. The iPad also marks the beginning of the end for the mouse.

Television is the medium that grows not shrinks

People will watch on a third screen. First screen becomes better. The gap between the home and the theater is narrower than it has ever been. Television couldn't grow until now. It could only grow as it escaped the home. Television becomes our constant companion. We are witness to ratings growth in "live event" television because of "co-viewing." We've always had co-viewing at home when people were together but now people who are not together are watching the same televised event via social networking as if they are together. Laugh tracks may disappear from television because of this new co-viewing via social networking. Movies don't have laugh tracks because producers know we will be watching movies with other people. Power: Content creators and viewers. When, where and how viewers want.

New Trends

Screen time is exploding. In 1975, we spent 16 hours in front of a screen, last year it was up to 36 hours, we think it will be over 50 hours in the next three to four years. If you look at a teenager there's not a moment when they are not in front of a screen except school and sleep. People almost never lose their mobile phones. Mobile phones are important in our lives.The reason is if we leave our phone on the table in a restaurant we can't make it to the front door of the restaurant before we're reaching for it. We can't get far enough away from it to lose it.

Privacy concerns reach a peak.

If digital content is to survive it's going to be largely through targeted digital advertising. Targetability with limits provides a great bonus to the media owner who can charge ten times as much to give an audience that the advertiser wants. A boon to the advertiser who can reverse the most powerful quote in the history of advertising - I know half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half. Boon to the consumer who can start receiving advertising that is relevant and engaging. Fun once the shock wears away.

What happens with privacy and targetability? Four simple things. Newspapers, television producers, advertisers have to tell their customers, their readers and viewers what information is being collected and why and what they intend to do with it. Privacy policy statements (written by lawyers) must not be written for lawyers. Serious penalties for anyone who violates those policies. Simple opt-out or opt-in but those who opt-out may have to start paying for what other people get for free.

Social networking is the real deal. To a teenager an online community is like a nightclub and when the uncool kids start showing up at the nightclub or the nightclub becomes too popular you're outta there. What's the worst thing that could happen to you at at nightclub? Your mother shows up. And now your mother wants to friend you on Facebook. Facebook will climb close to a billion users. We are not likely to see another monolithic community like Facebook again.

Learning curve must be much steeper than your action curve. You have to be paying attention, learning and watching.

Many of us are tired of technology defining our lives. We call this phenomenon "E-nuff already." Wanting the benefits of technology without all the disadvantages. We don't go to sleep without answering all our email. People are looking for balance. They want control.

Moving away from the PC-based internet to mobile devices. Only 4 to 6 percent of people who own PCs will actually need PCs (desktops, laptops, netbooks). When the iPad came out the first question was is this a fourth screen or a replacement for the second screen? Firmly convinced this replaces the second screen for the majority of us.

Mobile is everything. The internet is going everywhere through mobile. 5.7 billion people share having a mobile phone in their life.

-----------------

Bravos to Jeff for yet another truly amazing presentation, he's doing work that matters. Thanks too to ad:tech for sharing the video.

2010-12-15T15:53:00.025-06:00

"It is not the parts that matter, it is their combination." Vladimir Nabokov

"There is a moment when every work in the process of being created benefits from the glamour attaching to uncompleted sketches. 'Don't touch it any more,' cries the amateur. It is then that the true artist takes his chance." Jean Cocteau

"The only real voyage of discovery, the only Fountain of Youth, consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others, in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees. And this we can do with a Renoir or a Debussy; with such as they we fly indeed from star to star." Marcel Proust

Today's image: The Passage of Time by ToniVC. Beautiful, amazing shot. Thank you for sharing.

Nobody likes it but the audience

One of the biggest business success stories of 2010 is Groupon. Andrew Mason and his team have reinvented, actually reimagined, that old, well-worn shoe of retail pricing promotion - the coupon - and in the process they've "made the coupon cool." Andrew's stated goal is to "change the world...transform the way people buy from local businesses" and he's done just that in the world that is local advertising. In about two years Andrew and his team have emerged as a major player in the local advertising market (a $133 billion marketplace according to BIA/Kelsey) and are operating at a profit. They've also attracted the attention of unsolicited buyers including, so we are told, Google. While they continue to expand aggressively, adding new markets each week, the Groupon copycats are in hot pursuit with new imitators launching almost daily.

So how is it that the local advertising incumbents (e.g., newspapers, broadcasters, direct mailers) missed the incredible opportunity discovered by Groupon? Why have their coupon initiatives failed to achieve the success realized by Groupon? After all, the technology being used by Groupon is not at all proprietary. Using email to deliver coupons has been around for almost two decades. The simple facts would appear to be the incumbents failed to recognize coupons for what they could be, the suits saw them for what they were/are and ultimately no one liked the Groupon concept except the audience (and a significant majority of Groupon's client merchants). According to Andrew, the Chicago Groupon subscribers now number about one million (representing more than the combined circulation of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times).

Compare and contrast: What innovations have local incumbents launched during the past two years that can compare with Groupon's success? What enterprise launched by a newspaper, broadcaster or other ad-supported media firm in the past two years is now producing free cash and worth, at least, a one billion dollar evaluation?

How did this Groupon success suddenly happen?

My sense is Andrew and his team didn't know everything about the coupon business. Maybe they failed to understand or appreciate the accepted best practices and industry dogma. Perhaps they had no idea that single digit redemption rates were considered normal in the coupon and direct response trade. And because they were not coupon experts, they just didn't know what they didn't know. Because they didn't know or care about coupon conventional wisdom, they succeeded. Please permit me to guess again. They knew everything about the coupon business and having carefully studied it they boldly thought theirs was a different and better approach. No matter. Allow me to suggest that the single biggest difference between Groupon and their entrenched local competition is one of leadership. Team Groupon came to play.

Attitude
Fresh. Creative. Fun.

Andrew and his team imagined the coupon as a way to offer people "cool things to do" and part of their mission was to "help people to rediscover their city." The Groupon team focuses on helping customers get great deals that can be shared and enjoyed with friends. The Groupon team also focuses on merchants helping them to better understand how to advertise in a way that produces results. The Groupon business model ensured Groupon made money on every single transaction. Most of all, the Groupon team is to be commended, no, make that celebrated, for bringing a fresh, creative attitude to what has been the tired game of coupon. Andrew Mason and his team have earned their successes and they've done it by having the courage to make their enterprise fun.

Bravos, team Groupon!

What innovations in advertising and marketing will 2011 bring? The best is yet to come. Andrew Mason is but one of the new entrepreneurs that will dramatically change the landscape of local media. Here's a safe bet. It will be courageous, creative leadership that will make the difference and win the day. Stay tuned.

Bonus: Groupon 2.0 By Frank Sennett via Time Out Chicago, here. Hat tip to Robert Feder.

2010-12-01T14:04:00.003-06:00

"Scarcity comes from distinction. And distinction comes from being bold and meaningfully different. Rediscover your unbridled imagination and idealistic hopes, and create new and preemptive benefits. Shatter what conventional wisdom tells you can be done. Pour your heart into your idea. And pour your soul into bringing it to life." Tom Asacker

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary." Cecil Beaton

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now." Goethe

Today's image: By God's Grace by night86mare. Wonderful shot. Thanks for sharing.

Welcome to December and the final days of 2010. It's been an interesting if not exciting year but, as ever, the best is yet to come. Please let me suggest you give some serious thought to these questions...

Did you achieve the successes you wanted, needed to happen in 2010?

Are you ready, prepared to make 2011 the best year of your career and a record-breaking year for your enterprise?

No matter how you answer these questions you (and all on your team) will benefit from reading Opportunity Screams: Unlocking Hearts and Minds in Today's Idea Economy, the latest book by Tom Asacker. [Amazon info]

Tom's little book is a gem. It's one of those rare books that will make you think and inspire you to take action. It's a book you'll want to keep handy and return to, a book that will deliver fresh (and refreshing) insights with each new read.

What it's not...a book of rules, another collection of one-size-fits-all formulas or generic best practices.

What it is...a distillation of Tom's over twenty years of study into what works and doesn't work in the marketplace. Tom provides a framework, a practical template, for how to more deeply understand what's happening in today's increasingly complex and constantly changing idea economy. This book will help you to recognize those marketplace patterns most deserving your attention and, using Tom's framework, give you a genuine competitive advantage on the road ahead.

Opportunity Screams is simply one of the best business books of 2010. Get yours and get some to share this holiday season. [Amazon info]

2010-08-17T01:06:00.032-05:00

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Samuel Beckett

"After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life." Joseph Brodsky

"The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose." Jacques Monod

Today's image: If You Want to Achieve Greatness Stop Asking for Permission by Thomas Hawk. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

Eating your own dog food

Whose blog is this I think I know. He's spends his time on Twitter, though.

Been a while since I was last in this hall. Hope that you are enjoying your summer and that all is well with you.

Please allow me to share some thoughts about broadcasters and the road ahead.

A quick review of just about any station website will blatantly suggest broadcasters are laggards, they're not pacing with innovation. My thought is they should be (but are not) eating their own dog food. Let me put that into context. As Professor Leonard Lodish said...

"Technology-oriented people think if they build a better mousetrap, people will buy it," Lodish says. "But as the venture capitalists say, ‘The dogs don't always eat the dog food.' You've got to market effectively."

[ Reference: Getting the dogs to eat the dog food]

In my experience, station staffs are not living, breathing, and fussing over every pixel of their website(s). They're putting it out there but they're not, themselves, heavy users. Some station folk may like their site(s) but too few are real believers, honestly passionate, pumped about being in-the-tank, rabid evangelists, proud enough to say they LOVE their site(s), ready to take up the fight with anyone not in complete agreement that their site(s) is/are, by far, the very best in the market.

Clearly, station staffs are overworked and consumed with the daily press of affairs, however, the listeners/viewers don't care. They've been told to visit and when they do they typically find a site that fails to deliver. Station sites fail on many counts but none greater than failing as a total time suck. Too often listeners/viewers are failing to find things that they are excited about sharing. This is an epic fail, the failure of engagement. It's one of those engine warning lights you best be being paying close attention to going forward. The quality of your station website(s) has/have to be equal to or greater than the quality of your on-air product(s).

Do your assets matter?

Are they discoverable and easy to share?

A review of your referrals will give you a richer picture. How much of your inbound traffic is from the folks? Where are MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, Twitter, et al ranking in your referrals?

Last month, how many times did your site(s) strike the responsive chord and generate over one-hundred comments on a single post? How many times have your Twitter updates achieved the social network gold of 100+ retweets? How many times this year has your site attracted the attention of your local media colleagues and become news in the metro? When was the last time something on your site became the subject of state, national and/or international attention/news? Are your digital assets highly ranked and prized locally (e.g., A top 20 Twitter account in your DMA? Are one or more of your blogs respected and linked to by other local media and bloggers?). Are your assets "made fresh daily" dynamic and in the moment taking advantage of the new "nowness" and hyper-connectivity of the real-time network? I'm not talking about pulling a Webby nomination, I'm talking about the number of times you have crashed your server, I'm talking about the kind of stuff that leads to your sales people fighting over the inventory baked into your web assets.

If you've not achieved any of those kind of results know this - there is still time to get serious and get in the game. You can do it. It all starts with being honest and doing the hard work. First, show the listeners/viewers that you truly care. Care enough to get into the conversation and engage. Care enough to listen seriously. Care enough to eat your own dog food, the stuff that you keep telling your listeners/viewers to eat. How is it? How can it be better? What would have to happen to make it the best?

How do you go from being the station known (and loved) for Carlos and the Chicken (hat tip: Tom Webster) or that fun-loving morning show weather guy to also being the station known (trusted) for being the gold standard of ongoing local community engagement?

And, really important, please do remember this (Thank me later)

"People come back to places that send them away."
Dave Winer

Don't be concerned about whether the glass is half-empty or half-full, be very concerned with who's pouring. Game on! Your thoughts are invited and appreciated. Next, engaging the developer community and getting real about curation. Thanks for stopping by.

Bonus: TV stations websites are preaching to the choir by Terry Heaton, here.

Extra credit bonus: What Happened to Yahoo by Paul Graham, here.

P.S. If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room.

2010-07-20T05:42:00.008-05:00

"If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near." Jack Welch

"All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible." William Faulkner

"There's a saying among scientists, that you don't know you've got a really good idea until at least three Nobel laureates have told you it's wrong." Paul Lauterbur

Today's image: Learn to Fly by illeromela. Beautiful shot. Thank you for sharing.

Learning to Fly

The brilliant Bob Henabery, my creative godfather, often suggested to me that to understand the contrarian mindset one must be able to grasp "driving on the other side of the road." He was right.

Another mentor, the gifted genius Jim Yergin, frequently called me out on my use of metaphor, to wit: "By using analogy, injecting metaphor, what you are doing is avoiding the hard work of thinking. It tells me that you have not developed your thought to the point that you can articulate it clearly without secondary reference." He was right.

2010 should be a time of incredible opportunity for broadcasters. A game-changing moment when the most creative people working in professional audio and video take charge and take the lead in the brave new world of digital, always on audio and video. After all, they have an urgent need to make something happen.

Instead, we are witness to those without professional broadcast provenance taking charge: Pandora leads the emerging music audio space and YouTube leads the space that is becoming the new video.

How did it happen that broadcast professionals witnessed the take off and have continued to watch the early flight of these new players without mounting any significant response? What has enabled these amateurs to succeed, to make progress while the incumbents, the broadcasters, have, or so it may be argued, simply watched?

My sense is Pandora and YouTube have dared to dream.

They are learning to fly right before our eyes (and ears). What were once dismissed as "pigs on the runway" have taken flight and they're now on the radar.

While they may represent the best known entrants into the new audio and video spaces, they are not alone, they're only two of the increasing many that share a charter - reinventing media and radically changing the mediascape as we know it.

Next, I will offer a point of view and some suggestions for how broadcasters can and should move forward in this brave new world. As always, your comments are welcome and encouraged.

2010-05-31T17:11:00.021-05:00

"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation." Jean Kerr

"You're always a little disappointing in person because you can't be the edited essence of yourself." Mel Brooks

"To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing." Fred Shero

Today's image: And the Road Goes On Forever by Thomas Hawk. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.

Memorial Day
Help our troops and help their families.
Please, join me and give what you can
USO

Inspired by The Power of Pull by Hagel, Brown and Davison, today's post is a follow-on to my last post, here. This is the second in a series. From the book's introduction...

"It's quickly dawning on us...our education was at best a thin foundation
that needs to be continually refreshed in order for us to stay competitive.

The stress in our professional lives bleeds over into our personal lives as we find ourselves working longer hours and as long-standing relationships are disrupted by unexpected events...Incumbents at the core - which is the place where most of the resources, especially people and money, are concentrated, and where old ways of thinking and acting still hold sway - have many fewer incentives to figure out the world, or to discover new ways of doing things, or to find new information. They're on top, and they're ready to keep doing what got them there. But simply accessing or attracting static resources no longer cuts it. Accessing and attracting have little value unless they are coupled with a third set of practices that focus on driving performance rapidly to new levels. These practices involve participation in, and sometimes orchestration of, something we call 'creation spaces' - environments that effectively integrate teams within a broader learning ecology so that performance improvement accelerates as more participants join."

The authors suggest we are witness to a value migration from the "experience curve" to the "collaboration curve."

Answering the earlier call for "flow" we have the recommendations of another in my flow, Tom Webster. My thanks to Tom.

Justin Kownacki
Altitude Branding
Convince & Convert
in over your head
Six Pixels of Separation
Brian Solis

More from my flow. Three broadcasting (radio) blogs worth your bandwidth and three daily emails for you to consider.

Blogs/RSS:

jacoBLOG
The Infinite Dial
RAIN: Radio and the Internet Newsletter

Daily email newsletters, solid day-starters:

The Slatest
Mike Allen's Playbook
Hugh's Daily Cartoon

Who's in your flow? Please do get in touch with your suggestions. Thank you.

A word to the wise: It's no longer an option. You (and your stations) should be on Twitter. If you are, please consider this your written invitation to follow (@martindave), you have my pledge to follow back. Should you not be Twittering, why not? What exactly are you waiting for? Jump in! Getting started: Complete your profile including pic, link and bio. Tweet! Twitter tips: 1. Be yourself 2. Read replies, respond, engage. 3. Share the good stuff, RT and link 4. Manners matter, be nice. 5. Have fun.

Closed circuit to Jeff Haley: Join the conversation! Ready, willing and able to assist you in making the most of social networks including Twitter.

Congrats & cheers: All honored by Ad Age Magazine in their 2010 Entertainment A-List. The top five: Sony Pictures, Justin Bieber, Blind Side, Clear Channel, and The Beatles, Rock Band. Writing about Clear Channel, Ad Age says "Exec VP Evan Harrison's iHeartRadio makes Clear Channel a breeding ground for discovering new artists and a top earner in digital revenue" $175 million gross (SNL Kagan, 2009). 22 million monthly uniques at iHeartRadio.com

Bravos: The legendary Paulie Gallis on his latest lunch meet in Chicago. We had a great time gathered at Tavern at the Park. Attending were Mark Edwards, Brian Kelly, Tom Teuber, Kurt Hanson, John Gehron, Dan Kelley, Jim Scully, Dick Rakovan, Kipper McGee, Mike Shied, and Doug Dahlgren.

Summer reads: first in a series, the latest from N=1 fav Clay Shirky (non-fiction). From the publisher's release...

"The potential impact of cognitive surplus is enormous. As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before."

Pre-order: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky. [Amzn info]

Got a summer read to recommend? Please share in comments.

Bonus: Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution. Daniel Pink & Clay Shirky via Wired Magazine, here. "...organizations that are founded to solve problems end up committed to the preservation of the problems." - Shirky

Learn more, earn more: The Conclave's Summer Learning Conference happens July 15-17, in Minneapolis. Rock radio maven Fred Jacobs and his Jacobs Media team kick off Conclave's 35th year with a new annual learning event, Jacobs Media Summer School. Just added: Jerry Clifton's Night School. More info and online registration, here. Being involved behind the scenes provides me with some unique insider knowledge. Let's just say Conclave 2010 is one you do not want to miss. FD: I serve as an unpaid director on the Conclave board.

Must-read of the month: May: State of Play by B. Kite Pt 1. Some notes on the growing pains of gaming culture, here. Pt 2. Considering the artistic future of video games, here.

Enjoy or endure

Sir Ken Robinson returned to TED this year. Sir Ken's talk is an outstanding follow-on to his last TED appearance. His thesis is we make very poor use of our talents. His suggestion is there are two groups of people in the business world. Those who enjoy what they do and those who endure and wait for the weekend. For those that enjoy their work, it's not what they do, it's who they are. Note to leaders: job one is to create the conditions for achievement. Check out his wonderful new Ted Talk: Bring on the learning revolution!

Have an amazing week. Thank you for stopping by. Your thoughts via comments and email are always welcome and appreciated.

2010-05-22T16:28:00.018-05:00

"We are more easily persuaded, in general, by the reasons we ourselves discover than by those which are given to us by others." Blaise Pascal

"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity." Charles Mingus

"It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see." Henry David Thoreau

Today's image: eia by e7* Wonderful capture. Thanks for sharing.

Inspired by The Power of Pull by Hagel, Brown and Davison, today's post is an invitation, the first in a series. Let's get started with a slice from The Power of Pull introduction:

"The first and simplest level of pull is all about flexible access - the ability to fluidly find and get to the people and resources when and where we need them...Access will become increasingly necessary as competition intensifies and disruptions become more frequent. It used to be that we could rely on 'stocks' of knowledge - what we know at any point in time - but these stocks are diminishing in value more rapidly than ever before. Consider the compression of product life-cycles occurring in most global industries today. Even the most successful products fall by the wayside more quickly than the ones that preceded them as new generations come through the pipeline at an ever faster clip. In more stable times, we could sit back and relax once we had learned something valuable, secure that we could generate value from that knowledge for an indefinite period. Not anymore."

The challenge:

"Can you identify the fifty smartest or most accomplished people who share your passions or interests, regardless of where they reside?...For these fifty people, how effectively are you using social media to increase your mutual awareness of each other's activities?"

The context:

"Knowledge flows represent extraordinary opportunity. In a world where edges surface and grow rapidly, these knowledge flows provide the key to continually replenishing our knowledge stocks and exploring new forms of innovation. One challenge in an era of proliferating knowledge flows is to figure out which of these knowledge flows provide the most value. We often are not even aware of the full range of knowledge flows available and therefore cannot effectively use search tools and other mechanisms to access the most rewarding ones. We must master a new set of techniques designed to shape serendipity and attract attention in the most productive way possible. These techniques are the key in turning the challenge of knowledge flows into the rich opportunity of knowledge flows. Rather than a source of value destruction, they become a source of value creation."

The invitation:

My thought is we share our flows. Following, from my experience, are some of the sources that consistently offer solid insight, knowledge flow, that merits your attention. Of course, YMMV, so please do consider this an invitation to offer a few gems from your flow. Take a moment and share by leaving a comment. Alternatively, send me an email with your list and links or post to your blog, send me a link and we'll link to your post from here. Let's do this! Thank you.

Tom Peters! popurls Hacker News paidContent Joho the Blog

Scripting News Rosenblum TV BrandSavant Doc Searls Weblog

Beyond The Beyond Fimoculous Kevin Kelly Thomas P.M. Barnett's Globlogization

Tom Asacker Mediagazer EDGE MediaMemo

Lastly, from the Twitter, the linkers Twitter list by Patrick LaForge (@palafo)

This just in: My thanks to marketing maven Tom Asacker. Tom weighs in with these from his flow:

Grant McCracken
Jonathan Salem Baskin

Piers Fawkes
Matthew May

"The job of the dramatist
is to make the audience wonder what happens next.
Not to explain to them what just happened,
or to suggest to them what happens next."

David Mamet

Bonus: David Mamet Memo to Writers

More flow coming, next time. Thanks for stopping by.

2010-05-20T12:56:00.001-05:00

"Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other." John Dewey

"As the age of information demands the simultaneous use of all our faculties, we discover that we are most at leisure when we are most intensely involved." Marshall McLuhan

"Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities." Thomas Jefferson

Today's image: 131/365 by honeygueco. Beautiful. Thank you very much for sharing.

Please take ten minutes and watch the following video. The audio is a talk by Dan Pink, the video a very well done animation of his talk. If you have not yet read Drive, Dan's latest book, don't delay, it's a must-read. You will find a link in the left column of this page under "Reading." My thanks to RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) for allowing me to share this video with you.

2010-05-09T19:52:00.010-05:00

"The best preparation for tomorrow is to do today's work superbly well." William Osler

"I have learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." Henry David Thoreau

"Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle never know." Charles Kingsley

Today's image: untitled by Felipe T. Marques. Great shot. Thank you for sharing.

"The ROI of Social Media is
Your Business Will Still Exist in 5 Years"

The four minute twenty-five second update on social media. It's worth your bandwidth. My thanks to Erik Qualman.

Bonus: The first media trade publisher to stop the presses and get online was Bob Hamilton. Bob quit the dead tree business 27 years ago and started publishing in the world of 300 baud. His writing, Top 10 things "New Radio" has to be, deserves your attention, it's here. Kudos, Bob!

Good read: The Power of Pull by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison. Amazon info, here.

"Our basic management approaches are fundamentally broken...We are running faster and faster and falling farther and farther behind...The basis of competition is fundamentally changing...Value creation was around 'knowledge stocks'...We are moving to a world where the source of economic value becomes knowledge flows...Are you in the flow?...The means of value creation are shifting from push to pull..."

Related video: David Weinberger's Web of Ideas: John Hagel on the Power of Pull. My thanks to Dr David and the Berkman Center. Video, here.

2010-05-05T01:32:00.025-05:00

"Oh, give us the man who sings at his work." Thomas Carlyle

"The right man is the one who seizes the moment." Goethe

"Know the true value of time; snatch, seize and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination." Philip Dormer Stanhope

Today's image: Untitled by LJ. Great capture. Thank you very much for sharing.

Some good reads that deserve your attention.

This Scott Belsky book is a gem. The subtitle - "Overcoming obstacles between vision & reality" - sets the table for this good read.

Belsky offers solid insights and suggests a practical systematic approach for managing and directing the "creative psyche."

"...when we closely analyze how the most successful and productive executives, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople truly make ideas happen, it turns out that 'having the idea' is just a small part of the journey, perhaps only 1 percent of the journey." Amazon info, here.

The brothers who brought us Made to Stick and an interesting monthly read in Fast Company now have on offer Switch a story-driven narrative about that beast change. That they acknowledge, suggest Nudge, the fine writing of Richard Thaler & Cass Sunstein, as well as the Carol Dweck treasure Mindset, indicates these guys have done their homework.

"...we argue that successful changes share a common pattern. They require the leader of the change to do three things at once...Our goal is to teach you a framework, based upon decades of scientific research, that is simple enough to remember and flexible enough to use in many different situations..." Amazon info, here.

Jaron, a pioneer in virtual reality technology, has written a controversial "manifesto."

"...For millions of people, the internet means endless free copies of music, videos, and other forms of detached human expression. For a few brilliant and lucky people, the internet has meant an ability to spin financial schemes that were too complex to exist in the past, creating dangerous, temporary illusions of risk-free ways to create money out of thin air...there are obvious short-term benefits for some people, but ultimately a disaster for everyone in the long term." Amazon info, here.

Read a good book lately? Your suggestions are welcome. Please do share, leave a comment and suggest a read. Thank you very much.

We are all fortunate, blessed to be living in this very cool emerging world of hyper-connectivity. A new normal of always-on and nowness fueled by our access to and dependence on the network. Our handsets, boosted by that almost ubiquitous accelerant, wireless access, are driving totally new behaviors. Mobile is redefining the fundamentals, part of that is the very meaning of local, it's a whole new grammar and sense of place. Forget about DMA and census block code. The new local is defined in GPS terms - exactly where you are within three feet or less (think P.K. Dick). Time and space are obliterated in one click. Touch is the coming gesture, the new click. We are witness to a profound shift. A gradual fading of the desktop and its mouse. They're going the way of that fax machine handshake noise which is now merely years away from being pop culture trivia, and along with internet dial-up connection noise, an audio question on Jeopardy.

You've no doubt noticed, there's increasing chatter, buzz and discussion about all these early iterations of social networking and the social graph. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have captured respectable shares of mind.

Some perspective.

As a guy who was a dot com CMO back in the day, in what can reasonably be characterized as the first major wave of our digital networked society, the differences, compared to today, are indeed dramatic. In the first wave we all accepted the same operating mindset - spend your VC money as quickly as possible. The logic being you could get an equal, or greater, amount of cash in the next round. It was all about your "velocity" of spend, the rate at which you burned money. The table stakes included 20K a month for a PR firm, and at least one million dollars a month in advertising. You weren't considered to be in the game until that first full-page ad appeared in The Industry Standard (The Bible, "the newsmagazine of the Internet Economy"). At one point our CEO called me out during an off-site senior staff meeting for not spending enough money.

Today, the aggregate 2009 ad spend of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn would fall short of what we spent in one year at that now long gone dot com. This is nothing short of revolutionary. But wait, there's more because we're just getting started.

Something's happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear

According to Tom Webster the awareness of Facebook and Twitter is now over 80%, among the 12+ population in the US (Edison Research: Twitter Usage in America 2010).

Twitter's 2009 earned media included a segment on Oprah. Be honest. When was the last time anything your company did was featured on Oprah? The new rules of engagement suggest that the smartest kids working at social networks are enjoying the significant and unique benefits of earned media while the majority of us continue using an increasingly dated playbook (we pay for media). Conversely, the lasting power of the prime time (and live sports) television spot is confirmed daily - it continues to lead the communications mix in Apple product introductions. TV sellers should be using this to make their case.

The time for merely talking about social networks is coming to an end. It's time you and your team get serious and actually get into the game. You must have a well-reasoned strategy. However, you can forget about any urgent need to be correct. Just jump in with purpose. At this point we're all making this stuff up as we go along and don't let anyone tell you any different. If you and your team have a social networking success story please get in touch. I would love to learn what's working for you and, with your permission, share your story here.

Back to the countdown. The great news is, according to Tom, Facebook and Twitter usage estimates are still under 50% of the 12+ US population. Think of it this way, it's late 1975. FM radio first reached a 50 share of American radio listening in 1976.

Cohort replacement is the pure essence of nature at work. The digital immigrants have the advantage of years behind them while the digital natives are living closer to the future, the advantage of significantly more years ahead. I'm reminded of those old white AM radio guys in 1975 telling us FM kids that "nobody has ever complained about the quality of music on our station, your 'music sounds better on FM' argument is just stupid, it's ridiculous."

We can do this. As Gary Hamel once wrote...

"All that matters
is whether you care enough
to start from where you are."

High signal, low noise: Are you reading BrandSavant, Tom Webster's personal blog? It's a serious conversation about "gaining insight from social media data." Jump there now, it's here. Put this one in your reader. You'll thank me later.

Bonus: Beyond the Information Revolution by Peter F. Drucker. The Atlantic, October 1999.

2010-04-02T16:02:00.005-05:00

"Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly in the distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand." Thomas Carlyle

"It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement." Mabel Newcomber

"Enthusiasm is the greatest asset in the world. It beats money and power and influence." Henry Chester

Today's image: Could we please go back to start? by .cherry blossom Great shot. Thank you for sharing.

Start making something

Here's some great counsel from the wonderful new book, Rework. Highly recommended [Go, Start making something, Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson. Amzn info]

"We all have that one friend who says, 'I had the idea for eBay. If only I had acted on it, I'd be a billionaire!' That logic is pathetic and delusional. Having the idea for eBay has nothing to do with actually creating eBay. What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.

Think your idea's that valuable? Then go try to sell it and see what you get for it. Not much is probably the answer. Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea. And everyone's got one of those.

Stanley Kubrick gave this advice to aspiring film-makers: 'Get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.' Kubrick knew that when you're new at something, you need to start creating. The most important thing is to begin. So get a camera, hit Record, and start shooting.

Ideas are cheap and plentiful. The original pitch idea is such a small part of a business that it's almost negligible. The real question is how well you execute."

As Joe L. Floyd, my friend, former business partner and legendary broadcasting pioneer was fond of saying...

Talk is cheap,
whiskey costs money

Enough talk! Let's start making something. Please allow me to suggest a great place to get started.

Kurt Hanson is presenting his 8th annual RAIN Summit in Las Vegas on Monday, April 12th. The program begins at 10AM and runs until 7PM. It's one of this year's must-attend events. [More info, here]

What makes Kurt's RAIN Summit different and why should you go out of your way to be there?

Simply put, it's the one and only event where trailblazing thought leaders gather to share best practice, to discuss what's happening (and not happening) in the internet radio space. It also happens to be a world-class networking opportunity. If you own broadcast stations, work at the corporate staff or station level this is a meeting you cannot afford to miss. Moreover, if you're interested in learning, keeping current with what the best & brightest are up to, then you would be wise to make the investment.

RAIN Summit West concerns itself with the practical things that matter. Look into it and you'll discover an agenda packed full of presenters that are involved in actually making things, they belong to that entrepreneurial tribe of mavericks - the cool kids of nowness; they're the players, each and all working just ahead of the cutting-edge of our new mediascape.

My suggestion: stop making excuses, ignore the clueless, forget the advice of those who clearly don't get it (hint: they're the ones telling you they don't know anyone that's going) - make something happen, make plans to attend the RAIN Summit West. You'll thank me later.

Closed circuit to broadcasters, webcasters & vendors: For a limited time, take 30% off RAIN Summit registration by using the discount code "Martin30" when registering. Registration info, here. [FD: There's nothing in it for me should you use the code other than helping others to experience the awesomeness that is Kurt Hanson's RAIN Summit. Don't miss it if you can.]

Bonus: Must-read of the week. The Collapse of Complex Business Models by Clay Shirky, here.

Next time: Stuff you should be reading.

Thanks for stopping by. Have a wonderful weekend. See you next week in a brand new show.

2010-03-31T05:46:00.014-05:00

"So then the year is repeating its old story again. We are come once more to its most charming chapter." Goethe

"Courage is grace under pressure." Ernest Hemingway

"The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise." Tacitus

Today's image: reflections (A) by camil tulcan. Wonderful shot. Thanks for sharing.

"So what have you learned since I last saw you?"

That's the question leadership scholar Warren Bennis threw at Tom Peters. Tom goes on, in his latest book, to speak about learning. [The Little Big Things. Chapter 118. Learning. Making the Grade: Lifelong Learning Is a Mission-Statement Must. Amzn info]

"In our rapidly gyrating world, learning-for-life is no longer an option; it's a professional life (or death) necessity - as more and more are beginning to realize. This is true of you at age 17 or 27 or 47 or 67..."

"Bottom Line: I strongly believe that an explicit focus on 'lifelong learning' for everyone on board could well be the most sustainable advantage an organization of any flavor can have!

Hence, I hereby strongly (!!) suggest that...'An unstinting commitment by every one of us to accelerated lifelong learning'...or some close kin be made a formal part of your mission-values statement. It deserves to be right up there in the stratosphere with the likes of superior quality and profitability."

It's impossible not to agree with Tom Peters on the critical importance of lifelong learning. Understanding we are all busy, dollars and time tighter than ever, let me encourage you to sign up for a valuable learning opportunity.

Should you be reading this on March 31st, and you're in the broadcasting business, congrats, it's your lucky day. My thought is there are two must-attend learning events coming up in 2010. Please allow me to suggest that you will benefit by attending both.

First, the 35th annual Conclave Learning Conference, being held in Minneapolis, July 15 - 17. It's a meeting built on a long and rich tradition. In fact, it's the longest running radio programming conference in America.

As you may have heard, this year's Conclave begins with the debut of the Jacobs Media Summer School, a very special new event developed by Fred Jacobs and his Jacobs Media team. Fred's event, certain to be amazing, is only the beginning. Everything I'm hearing from the Conclave agenda committee suggests that this year's Conclave Learning Conference will be one truly exceptional experience and one you should go out of your way to attend. It has the potential to be the best Conclave in history and that would certainly be something you should not miss.

If you've attended a Conclave you know all about the special, unique experience - this is the year you should come back. If you've not been to a Conclave Learning Conference then this is the year you should take your first Conclave deep dive.

Who should attend? If you work in broadcast media you'll benefit by attending. While the Conclave is an excellent networking opportunity, the actionable take away is unmatched. The agenda is packed with practical knowledge, stuff that you can put to work back at your stations.

Here's the best part. Until midnight tonight you can register for only $149, that's 50% off the $299 registration. But you must act today. Complete the registration form and in the Gang of Ten section use the code "35 Insider." That's it! You're in for $149. There's no need to list nine others in the Gang of Ten section of the form because this code has already qualified for the special discount.

This offer expires today. Pay $149 today or - if you wait - $299 or more. I'm suggesting you take advantage of this valuable learning opportunity by taking action today. Don't wait. Use the following link, the Gang of Ten code "35 Insider" and get registered today. Please email this post or copy/paste and forward this information on to friends and colleagues. Friends don't let friends pay retail. You can also get details on the special $99 rate at the host hotel. If you're reading this after March 31st let me again encourage you to attend. The cost of Conclave registration remains an outstanding value.

Here's the link, for more info and to register, Click Conclave. See you at the Conclave! [FD: I serve as an unpaid member of the Conclave board]

Tomorrow, information (and a discount code) about my second must-attend conference of 2010.

As always, thank you for stopping by.

2010-03-12T13:03:00.005-06:00

"Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same without such opinion, despair." Thomas Hobbes

"Whatever enlarges hope will also exalt courage." Samuel Johnson

"Initiative is to success what a lighted match is to a candle." Orlando Battista

Today's image: tea by Garry Wiesgin. Amazing shot. Thank you for sharing.

Let's catch up. Two good reads worthy of your bandwidth...

A simply wonderful collection of Tom Peters thinking (and living) out loud.

"Instead of waiting to launch a new idea or business until 'things get better,' or starting off every project with a focus on cost minimization, consider instead this quote from former Lend Lease (Australia) CEO Stuart Hornery:

"Every project we take on starts with a question:

'How can we do what's never been done before?' "

Make Hornery's Bold Question your automatic Question #1:

"How will this project enhance the Customer Experience in a way that's so 'dramatically different' from our competitors that we capture new customers and retain old customers and grow our share of business with them. And markedly boost the 'top line'?"

"THINK DIFFERENT" must be a full-time preoccupation in good times and bad..."

The Little BIG Things: 163 Ways to Pursue EXCELLENCE. [Amazon info] Follow Tom on Twitter, here.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hansson, the founders of 37signals, have produced a gem. Rework is a playbook for the real world, a compilation of clear headed business rules.

"Inspiration is perishable.

We all have ideas. Ideas are immortal. They last forever. What doesn't last forever is inspiration. Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an expiration date.

If you want to do something, you've got to do it now. You can't put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can't say you'll do it later. Later, you won't be pumped up about it anymore.

If you're inspired on a Friday, swear off the weekend and dive into the project. When you're high on inspiration, you can get two weeks worth of work done in twenty-four hours. Inspiration is a time machine in that way. Inspiration is a magical thing, a productivity multiplier, a motivator. But it won't wait for you. Inspiration is a now thing. If it grabs you, grab it right back and put it to work."

Rework [Amazon info] Follow Jason on Twitter, here.

Bonus: Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously by David Gelernter. Must-read of the week, via EDGE, here.

Thanks for stopping by. Have an incredible weekend. Back next week with a brand new show.

2010-01-28T16:46:00.012-06:00

"We hate to decide. We avoid deciding. We hide from it...Once someone decides, they almost always succeed (unless they want to win an Olympic medal or some other ridiculous prize awarded to just a few). The decision is the hard part, but we spend precious little time on it." Seth Godin

"In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing." Theodore Roosevelt

"Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision." Peter Drucker

Today's image: Mount Hood by rasone. Amazing. Thank you very much for sharing.

Be Decisive

One of the most important and difficult responsibilities of effective leadership is being decisive. Gathering relevant information, ensuring data used is credible, timely (fresh), crafting and seriously considering a variety of practical solutions sets, while essential, are the easy parts of the decision making process. The most challenging part involves intellectual rigor devoid of pedantry.

"Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."
George Bernard Shaw

Thinking is the underlying magic, the hard work in the decision making process, the wellspring of good decisions. Critical thinking, at its best, is an intellectually honest labor, the product of cognitive diversity, it's serious thought imbued with imagination.

"Most people in an industry are blind in the same way - they're all paying attention to the same things, and not paying attention to the same things."
Gary Hamel

My sense is too many firms have defined and adopted so much best practice that they have become, more or less, identical. This operating mindset comes from prizing only the knowable, respecting nothing but the proven, it's a process driven by the singular mission of minimizing the unpredictable. Unfortunately, this approach inevitably leads to institutionalized risk-aversion and incrementalism. Innovation gives way to inertia. Original thinking is not required. Moreover, the "untested" is discouraged, frowned upon. The danger is this becomes an irrational quest for the holy grail of predictability, a search for something elegant (perhaps something akin to the next Black-Scholes formula). Caution, one might be wise to mind the counsel of Albert Einstein: "Elegance is for tailors." In other words, be skeptical of elegant math.

It is my suggestion that there has never been a time more favorable, more ripe for being a contrarian. Dare to embrace the naive assumption. Foster the chaos that is unvarnished candor, search for what's missing, carefully study what your competitors are doing and seriously consider doing the exact opposite. Differentiate in all you do. Create contrast. Each day, ask yourself the most important questions of all...WHY? and WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE?

"Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen
and thinking what nobody has thought."
Albert von Szent-Györgyi

Once you've done your homework, done the hard work of thinking and reached your decision let me suggest that you add one more important step before taking action. It comes from Harvey Mackay, the famous Minnesota envelope maker turned business writer, and it's a gem. Gather your team one more time and ask...

"What are the five things that could go wrong,
and what would we do about each."

Today's quote by Seth Godin courtesy of Hugh MacLeod. It comes from an interview with Seth on Hugh's blog, Gapingvoid (linchpin: ten questions for seth godin). Earlier this month Hugh started "Hugh's Daily Cartoon" - it's free via email and I highly recommend it, sign-up here.

Get more info on Seth's new book Linchpin, (it's a good read) via Amazon, here.

My thanks to Seth and Hugh.

2009-12-16T06:08:00.030-06:00

"If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough." Albert Einstein

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Aristotle

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." Henry Ford

Today's image: Moon For Masako by ~EvidencE~ Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

The product is the marketing
Do things worth talking about

Gordon McLendon got it right. The Old Scotchman, one of the true wizards of 20th century wireless, gave his managers much wise counsel, including this precious gem: "Get people to talk about your radio station."

Long before business writers and marketing mavens first hit on the now vogue notion of "word of mouth" marketing, McLendon and company were holding multi-metro clinics on manufacturing buzz and taking it to the bank.

Today most broadcast managers are preoccupied (overwhelmed might be a more honest characterization) with the crush of daily affairs. The urgent is getting all the attention and in the process it's the important that is being neglected.

On the day job, in our work with radio, television and new media managers, we are witness to the production of outstanding results including some amazing, remarkable ROI. Without exception, those results are produced by starting with a single serious focus, an obsession with the product.

In our experience, these winning managers share attributes which set them apart from others, here now are four...

1. A mindset that encourages and rewards risk taking, appreciates failing faster as the secret sauce of innovation.

2. A respect for talent, a deep understanding that creativity is a renewable resource.

3. A daily dedication, a drive, which keeps them fresh, on fire and pathologically competitive.

4. They love and honor their craft. Accordingly, they have fun, consistently bring their A game, come to play and play to win. They do work that matters, things worth talking about.

Our best advice continues to be summarized in one simple declarative sentence...

"All that's important is what
comes out of the speakers
and on the screen(s),
everything else is a footnote."

Please allow me to again suggest that you read The Design of Business by Roger Martin [Amzn info]. Following are three paragraphs taken whole from that writing. My thanks to Roger Martin.

"Some contexts don't reward repetition, structuring, and planning that are the hallmarks of mastery. Those nonstandard contexts require the creation of a new approach or solution; they require originality. Originality demands a willingness to experiment, spontaneity in response to a novel situation, flexibility to change directions as information dictates, and responsiveness to opportunities as they present themselves, even if they're unexpected. Rooted as it is in experimentation, originality openly courts failure. It's important to become comfortable with the processes of trial and error and iterative prototyping, or you'll be tempted to focus on the less risky mode of mastery, to the exclusion of originality.

Mastery without originality becomes rote. The master who never tries to think in novel ways keeps seeing the same thing the same way. In this manner, mastery without originality becomes a cul-de-sac. By the same token, originality without mastery is flaky, if not entirely random. The power is in the combination."

Martin's thesis concerns combining proof-based analytical thinking with possibility-based abductive thinking (Charles Sanders Peirce's "third form of logic"). His writing makes the case for the advertising put forth in the subtitle of his book, "why design thinking is the next competitive advantage." At the end of his writing he offers this thought...

"As you grow more sure-footed and adept at maintaining the design thinker's balance, you will gain fluency in both the allusive poetry of intuitive discovery and the precise prose of analytical rigor."

Readers are leaders: Amazon.com - Best Books of 2009 - Top 10 Books: Business & Investing, here. AdAge - Book of Tens: 10 Books You Should Have Read in 2009 by Matt Kinsey, here.

Congrats & cheers: Uber-cool media entrepreneur Rob Barnett, Warren Chao and their hard-working, wicked sharp My Damn Channel gang, winners of the first ever New Media Minute Award of Excellence [more info]. Well deserved. (Stay tuned...these guys are just getting started.) Radio programming ace Scott Shannon named VP, Programming for group operator Citadel. If you're keeping score, that's day job number five for the exceptionally gifted Mr Shannon. His other gigs include hosting the highly rated WPLJ breakfast show where he also serves as PD. In his spare time Scott is the mid-day star of the True Oldies Channel where he again doubles up, serving with distinction as the net's chief creative officer and principal architect.

Bonus: Rethinking How Broadcast Media Uses Research by Tom Webster, here. Kudos, Tom. Seems to me we have a bunch of smart people preoccupied with study, comparative analysis, interpretation and serious discussion related to the old answers when they should, instead, bring intellectual rigor to a critical pursuit of discovery - finding the new questions. Roger Martin said something that relates here "...(the reliability-driven colleague) sees the future as the enemy and the past as a friend."

On Twitter? Love books? Please support FLWBooks, Twitter's champion of the book, more info > here

2009-12-14T08:38:00.009-06:00

"Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student." Stewart Brand

"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." Eric Hoffer

"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, but illusion of knowledge." Stephen Hawking

Today's image: ...the day is done by valonnna. Great shot. Thanks for sharing.

Spending the last days of this year writing my 2010 brief. The working (draft) title is The Handset Horizon: Leading digital innovation. The executive summary will be a forty-five minute presentation taken from the full ninety-minute brief. To learn more about the brief and availability, please contact me directly via email (my contact info may be found in the left column of this page). Thank you.

Here's one key lesson for media managers from my 2009 brief:

Your assets must be...

Digital
Discoverable
Ready to Share

10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2010 by Ravit Lichtenberg via ReadWriteWeb...

"Whether you are an individual, a startup, small business or a large corporation, an online presence and an ongoing conversation with your constituents is a baseline requirement -- and will take time and expertise. Companies are diverting resources and rethinking their traditional outreach strategies. 'Whether you're recruiting, looking for investment, trying to get buzz -- you need to be visible,' says John Nogrady, director, emerging business at Microsoft bizpark, and serial entrepreneur. Brian Zisk, founder of SFMusicTech, which is taking place in San Francisco this week, says 'If you're out there as a genuine contributor in the community you can reach out to many people. Take the FooFighters' free Facebook concert, or Zoe Keating -- a local artist with over 1.2 million fans online. Their ability to connect with their fans was made possible because of the Internet.'" Read the entire post, here.

Bonus: Get your week off to a great start. Take some time to review What Matters Now. Download your own copy, share, post. Think! Make something happen. My thanks to Seth Godin for sharing.

What Matters Now

2009-12-06T16:17:00.020-06:00

“The business world is full of two kinds of people—builders and traders. Over the past 20-30 years, traders have increasingly ruled. They receive the highest compensation. We need to tame the traders.” Roger Martin

"Status comes from running large, high-revenue business units whose operations have been reduced to reasonably reliable algorithms that product results on time and on budget. Those are the highest goals, that is, the ones that command the highest compensation. That is why most executives prefer the known to the unknown." Roger Martin

"Most companies try to be innovative, but the enemy of innovation is the mandate to 'prove it.' You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning." Roger Martin

Today's image: Jul 9, 2009 - Full moon over 96th St. by Ed Yourdon. Wonderful shot. Thanks for sharing.

Let's play catch up. A bunch of good stuff to share.

Let me again suggest that you read The Design of Business by Roger Martin [Amzn info]. Put simply, Martin has written one of the most important business books of the year. Priced at under $20 on Amazon, it's a gem that deserves your attention (and that of your team).

Speaking of books, while we await his latest [Drive - Amzn info], Daniel Pink shares his favorite books of 2009, here.

"The problem is no longer budget. The problem is no longer access to tools.

The problem is the will to get good at it." Seth Godin

Seth Godin offers a must-read post. He asks "Is it too late to catch up? What if your organization or your client has done nothing? What if they've just watched the last fourteen years go by? No real website, no social media, no permission assets. What if now they're ready and they ask your advice? And, by the way, they have no real cash to spend..." Seth offers an excellent top ten list of things to consider doing, here.

Tom Webster continues to post interesting things. Raising The Game In Social Media is Tom's latest thoughtful post, here via his brandsavant (which I encourage you to put in your reader). But wait, there's more. Tom has rebooted his mad cool link blog DataSnob, don't spend another online minute without it, here.

Sharon Waxman dials us into the Comcast NBCU arithmetic, to wit: "...NBC was valued at zero for the purposes of the financial analysis." Read Comcast: It's a Brave New World, and Cable Runs It via her WaxWord stand at thewrap.com, here.

Jennifer B. Kahnweiler offers a good read - Why Introverts Can Make The Best Leaders (They draw on important strengths that extroverts may not have) via Forbes.com, here.

Closed circuit to broadcast managers: Should your team not yet be in touch with MediaNet my suggestion is you need to get to know them. My sense is you can create competitive advantage for your station using the tools and tech resources offered by MediaNet. Here's some insight, take a moment and read the Matt Rosoff piece, MediaNet could power the online music revolution via CNET News, here.

Best of the best: A work in progress. THE essential 2009 End-of-Year Lists by the uber-cool Rex Sorgatz [@fimoculous], here. Except no substitute.

Which one doesn't belong: You remember the game from grade school. Apple, Banana, Orange, Hammer. Try this one. Elvis, Jordan, Pryor, Stern. That's the group comparison made in the latest TV ad for Mel's pay radio venture - it's plainly delusional. Creative fails to make the sale. Moreover, it's a pure waste of money the venture doesn't have. This poor creative and related wrong-headed investments were bound to happen. Mel is nothing more than a novice when it comes to spending money on marketing.

Let's connect: Should you be on LinkedIn, an invitation to join your network is welcome, here. If you're on the Twitter, please do follow me and engage so that I may follow you back, here. Thanks.

Thanks for stopping by.

2009-11-24T12:46:00.007-06:00

"The breakthrough innovations come when tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That’s when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business." Clayton M. Christensen

"Creativity is thinking new things. Innovation is doing new things." Theodore Levitt

"Planning, by its very nature, defines and preserves categories. Creativity, by its very nature, creates categories or re-arranges established ones." Henry Mintzberg

Today's image: ...my home town by -Just John- Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

The following text is an excerpt taken from the Sean Ross email newsletter and is shared here in the hope it will prompt you to remember a pro now out of work, cause you to take action and reach out to those in need. My thanks to Sean.

This Holiday Season, You Make The Call

Every ROR (Ross On Radio) reader undoubtedly knows a programmer with a great track record and without a radio station. You may not have reached out to this person in a while: maybe over guilt about being the one who's still working; maybe because you don't know how to help; perhaps because there's no good way to respond to somebody who is (justifiably or otherwise) frustrated and angry about being cut off from an industry they contributed to for so many years - an industry that is hardly flourishing without them.

So, if you are in any way touched by Dene Hallam's death, chances are excellent that you have phone calls of your own to make this holiday season. However few resources you may be able to offer somebody, you have the opportunity to make them feel less marginalized.

Buy a cool book, help a charity. As you may know, Turn It Up! American Radio Tales is the wonderful book by Bob Shannon. It's the must-read for radio geeks. Just in time for holiday gift giving, Bob is offering his book at a special discount and he will make a donation to the Conclave for each book sold. Get more info, purchase the book at the not otherwise available deep discount, here. [FD: I serve as a director for the charity and as an unpaid adviser to the author]

Bonus: Killer value proposition. Attend the Conclave 2010 Learning Conference and pay the early bird rate of $199 or get a group of ten together and pay only $149. More info, here.

2009-11-22T17:55:00.035-06:00

"If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot." Umberto Eco

"Life is too short not to do something that matters" Hugh MacLeod

"We think the Internet is moving completely toward mobile." Jeff Cole

Today's image: otono by Darco TT. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

The last post here included a mention of "unlearning" and marketing maven Tom Asacker offered a comment

...I think "unlearning" is nearly impossible. People simply can't "throw out all of the furniture," and knickknacks, memorabilia, etc. Instead, they need to pick up and move. It's during the move that they unload the old, useless collection of thoughts, routines, etc. New thinking comes from a new environment, not from a redecorated one.

Tom makes a thoughtful argument and I certainly agree that unlearning is difficult. It is Tom's notion to "pick up and move" that presents a uniquely interesting challenge. My thought is those leading today's media organizations are dedicating resources and a majority share of mind to business preservation. While there is an urgent need to develop new business models, an increasingly obvious need to get serious about the digital frontier, the oxygen required for such development must come from sustaining present revenues.

My sense is our media "house" can be likened to Dorothy's in The Wizard of Oz. Caught up in forces of the environment, we seem to have been struck unconscious whilst our "place" in the world is being forever changed. Our landing in a digital Oz however should not be confused with a dream. Much like Dorothy, we are living through an unexpected, disruptive, game-changing moment. It's every bit as dramatic as our awakening when watching the move. We suddenly see things in color after first coming to know, accept a "normal" world of black and white.

Media organizations, many being accountable to Wall Street, are operating to optimize near-term earnings. This mindset rewards the predictable outcome which fosters the twin enemies of innovation - incrementalism and institutionalized risk aversion. Activity becomes focused on optimizing the known numerator. Optimization alone will produce earnings growth but only to a finite point. Once every variable that can be influenced has been optimized growth inevitably stalls, the street is disappointed. Management makes references to peer performance, sector issues and impact of the macroeconomic environment. Beware the bad comp, know its potential in creating an illusion of progress.

The real danger is running on empty, leading a portfolio of so-called wasting assets. Continuing a die hard devotion to tweaking what is without imagining other futures.

The rate of innovation outside of media organizations is greater than inside. This should serve as the first engine warning light flashing. When school children and other amateurs can produce and upload a YouTube video that gets more views and comments than the expensive scripted shows running in prime we should understand it's time to have an adult conversation. When the majority of top ranked social media users in any given DMA are listeners and viewers (the group formerly known as the audience) rather than media properties, or professional media creators it seems time to entertain a serious discussion concerning what's happening, what's not happening and how we might influence the action going forward.

This is not a dress rehearsal
We are professionals
This is the big time
On with the show

We must discover ways to create new markets, new denominators and, it seems to me, that will require moving to the new environment that Tom writes about. He's right on the money. In 2010 orchestrating that move effectively will become your other full-time job. Having a keen sense of place has, perhaps, never been more important nor more potentially rewarding. My thanks to Tom Asacker.

In sum, we need to do - as Hugh MacLeod suggests - something that matters. Let me encourage you to begin that process by investing some time today to watch a video. It's the Jeff Cole keynote at last week's MPR hosted Future of News Summit. It's about what's happening around us and deserves your attention. You may access the video via YouTube, here. Watch, share with your team, think, discuss, dream, create.

Bonus: I'll Tumblr For Ya. The David Karp interview by Ned Hepburn via VICE, here.

Tweet of the Week: Killer. My thanks to Timesman and uber-cool Twitterer Patrick LaForge. View tweet, here.

2009-11-19T05:26:00.042-06:00

"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be." Paul Valery

"Where are you likely to find people with the least diversity of experience, the largest investment in the past, and the greatest reverence for industry dogma? At the top." Gary Hamel

"If you work slowly and meticulously, you merely end up with a very fine implementation of your initial, mistaken idea. Working slowing and meticulously is premature optimization. Better to get a prototype done fast, and see what new ideas it gives you." Paul Graham

Today's image: Banksy (crop) by Martin in London. Great shot. Thank you for sharing.

Not what they signed up for

Much continues to be written about the state of affairs in ad-supported measured media. The 400 year-old death spiral of the dead tree guys is, rightly, getting the most attention. Jeff Cole, the brilliant media scholar and leading researcher of our new digital world, said at this week's MPR hosted Future of News Summit..."Instead of counting down the two newspaper towns, we now count up the no newspaper towns." Jeff went on to say should a newsprint eating virus vanish newspapers no one under forty would notice and, off the cuff, opined that a precious handful of papers would survive. Indicating the NYT, WSJ, WaPo, USAT were likely among the short listed survivors, he suggested "my LAT" was headed towards ruin.

The problem for jazz stations and college professors

Cole said we will see incredible consolidation ahead and this will extend to the academy. He indicated 2,000 US college professors now teach Introduction to Psychology. Why should anyone have to take the course from anyone other than the best professor in the country or the world, who might even be dead when they teach the course. We will end up with three or four professors teaching three or four basic courses - via the internet - the best professors who have ever taught the subjects. We don't have a need for 2,000 teaching the same course.

We no longer need listen to local radio that we perceive to fall short of expectation. Professor Cole used Jazz radio as an example. We are not bound to tolerating the poor local jazz station when we may opt to listen to the best jazz station in the world (he's heard it originates in India). This echos my brief before the 2005 Conclave Learning Conference: "It is no longer a game of being the best at what you do in your market, that soon won't be enough to sustain success. You must rise to the challenge of being the best in the world at what you do - and becoming known for it."

"For those who want to understand the environment in which we are operating, our learning curve has to be much steeper than our action curve.
We have to be studying and watching and following relentlessly." Jeff Cole

Cole made an excellent point when he suggested TIME Magazine got it wrong three years ago. They had missed a significant cultural shift (the fundamental importance of "community") when naming its Person of the Year "YOU" instead of "US." You may access video of Jeff Cole's keynote, truly a tour de force, via YouTube, here. Highly recommended.

One of the best lines of the meet was by Richard Gingras, CEO of Salon Media Group. Quoting his own earlier tweet, he said "The future of news is a future of conferences about the future of news."

Let us commend Bill Kling and his MPR team for organizing and hosting such an important gathering. Let us also extend kudos to MPR's own Julia Schrenkler for coordinating a real-time, robust and leading-edge companion effort online. Julia tells me it was her team that pulled off the practically flawless execution. She does single out the uber-cool camera jockey Chuck Olsen for his valuable behind-the-scenes contributions. Should you wish to learn more about The Future of News Summit, the MPR team offers a Ning, here. Julia has advised me that more video and ppt will be posted in the coming days.

Those that follow me on Twitter are perhaps aware that I attempted to live tweet the summit. As usual I was getting things almost right, sometimes dead wrong, leaving important stuff out but dear friends such is the nature of live tweeting. You may access the live tweets (and retweeting of many) by searching the tfon hashtag, here.

Later I'll post more on the issues raised during the summit. Today, allow me to invite your attention to two items and, while we're at it, a throwback to 2004 and a bonus must-read.

We have an urgent need to invite more women, minorities and youth to participate in our most important discussions. It is hard to argue the presence of (or respect for) cognitive diversity when industry gatherings continue to feature middle-aged white men in the majority. We can change this overnight. Let's do it.

While there is no shortage of blame being delegated for today's troubles in ad-supported measured media we have witnessed a change. Once celebrated as rock stars, CEOs are now, more often than not, the goats of coarse derision. No offense to goats intended. The transition of CEO from visionary wealth building genius to tone deaf idiot has happened in less than a decade.

Jeff Cole offered many valuable insights during his remarks. Among them saying executives that had started their careers in newspapers, broadcasting and advertising thirty years (or more) ago have a significantly different pov of the business than those that came into the industry in the middle 1990s. There have, in fact, been profound and dramatic changes in the way business is done. It's a sea change, a very different business as usual set point. While I am not one to defend or excuse the bad practices or poor decisions of most media CEOs, please permit me to suggest that what is happening today is clearly not what any sitting CEO signed up for (or even imagined) twenty, thirty or forty years ago. Therein one core problem of our failed industry leadership. Dee Hock said it best, to wit:

"When it became necessary to develop a new perception of things, a new internal model of reality, the problem is never to get new ideas in, the problem is to get the old ideas out. Every mind is filled with old furniture. It is familiar. It is comfortable. We hate to throw it out."

It remains my proffer that the serious challenge at hand is one of unlearning. For the record, my first blog post here in February of 2004 was prompted by a single concern - leadership. You can access that first post, The Fish Stinks at the Head First, here.

Sidebar: During thirty talks given this year I have made mention of my run heading an American broadcast group disclosing my thought that the results produced during my watch (in the 1980s and 90s) could have been replicated by an inflatable doll or stuffed animal assigned my role. My thought being this was not a singular experience, this replacement exercise would have proven equally successful at those other organizations led by my peers. Truth be known, we were all managing inventory, playing golf and/or tennis and doing very well without any serious sustained thought or discussion given to innovation. Those of us lucky enough to have strong general managers did just fine by staying out of the way as the money flowed into stations, it rained dollars. One would have needed a carefully detailed plan in order to fail. On the occasions group heads gathered, we would talk - beyond the usual lying to each other - people, markets, treasury (how we handled the money), exchange war stores of bad deals passed and share the hidden values of each others known acquisitions making published purchase prices seem very shrewd. Broadcast was our business and business was good.

As Mary Hopkin once sang "Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end." Clearly, that party is over. I have rarely been challenged on this assertion. Those few times I have been called out, intellectual honesty prohibited my purchase of the kool-aid. Got no interest in joining those on an ice flow drifting to oblivion - those sharing the false belief, the plainly irrational delusion, that things will one day "come back." The opportunity rich reality of now holds far more appeal to me than the wayback machine. Game on.

Bonus: Tom Webster, the digital cool kid of Edison Research, has posted a writing that merits your attention. Read Social Media: Just A Hobby? via The Infinite Dial, here.

As always, you're comments are welcomed - please join the conversation. Thanks for stopping by. More tomorrow.

2009-11-08T12:12:00.003-06:00

"I think luck is the sense to recognize an opportunity and the ability to take advantage of it. Everyone has bad breaks, but everyone also has opportunities. The man who can smile at his breaks and grab his chances gets on." Samuel Goldwyn

"We must look for the opportunity in every difficulty instead of being paralyzed at the thought of the difficulty in every opportunity." Walter Cole

"Present opportunities are neglected, and attainable good is slighted, by minds busied in extensive ranges and intent upon future advantages." Samuel Johnson

Today's image: 316-317 by Mr. Moog. Outstanding shot. Thanks for sharing.

Recommending two books that merit your attention:

Roger L. Martin is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. More about each book...

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Amzn)

The Opposable Mind: Winning Through Integrative Thinking (Amzn)

2009-11-05T22:29:00.013-06:00

"The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid." Fred Wilson

"Great opportunities come to all, but many do not know they have met them. The only preparation to take advantage of them is simple fidelity to watch what each day brings." Albert Dunning

Today's image: Queen of the Skies by Tim de Groot. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Bravos: By far the best and brightest writer on the media beat, Robert Feder, returned this week. Thanks to Chicago Public Radio and their vocalo.org venture for making this happen. Must-reading for serious students of media. You may find Robert, here.

Bonus: Tom Webster is writing stuff you should be reading. His latest is a gem. The Least Efficient Post I've Ever Written via Edison Media's The Infinite Dial, here. While reading Tom's piece, Drucker came to mind, to wit: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

As we approach the dawn of our codependent hyper-connectivity several two-word tropes are so white hot that I am - for reasons related to my day job insurance - required to don asbestos gloves before further keystroke is attempted. Here now, two of those...

Real-Time

Live Search

My thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick, one of the cool kids in residence at Read Write Web, for the tip on this video. Kudos to the leapfish gang, well done. (P.S. I agree with Marshall, should the search thing not work out you should seriously look into producing killer videos)

2009-10-22T06:26:00.020-05:00

"Thank God for screw-ups, for if life had adhered strictly to six sigma rules, we’d all still be slime." Gary Hamel

"Mindless habitual behavior is the enemy of innovation." Rosabeth Moss Kanter

"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to management than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely the lukewarm defense in those who gain by the new ones." Nicolo Machiavelli

Today's image: canal by Banksy. Wonderful. Thank you for sharing.

It's the top line, stupid.

Broadcast leadership continues to be obsessed with tweaking the numerator.

My sense is too many are still keeping score like it's 1999. Preoccupied with optimization they continue to fail because they do not yet appreciate the critical importance of recognizing and unlocking the incredible value inherent in attempts at bold innovation. Truth be known, playing around with numerator has reached beyond the point of diminishing returns. To be blunt, optimization strategies for broadcast operators are well past their best used by date. Attention and resources continue to be invested in getting better at a game that is less and less relevant. Over the past ten years every department (and related function mission systems) at broadcast stations has fundamentally changed with one exception - sales. Proof of this abounds. Any candid accounting of results produced will tend to support this assertion. Let me suggest the best (and most important) evidence may be found by talking with buyers. How has the "broadcast buying experience" changed? How does this experience stack up when compared to other media options?

If you always do what you've always done,
you'll get what you've always gotten

Permit me to invoke an old saw from Zig Ziglar "Two sure ways to fail. Think and never do or do and never think." Broadcast leadership appears to have cornered the market on both. Enough! My thought (confirmed by recent experience) is the new game is getting really serious about changing the denominator. Sales development - the hard work of driving new top lines. Getting fresh and creative in perspective and approach. Experimentation. Discovery. Learning how to respect, appreciate and reward the art of failing faster in order to succeed sooner.

On the day job we have observed the best "return on imagination" begins with unvarnished discussion concerning the creation of new markets rather than the same old fights over how to grow an increasingly irrelevant metric - silo share of a declining market. Going to work to kill the guy across the street is simply not an effective strategy in driving top line development and the entire ball game is, plainly, to continually, consistently and creatively develop the top line without any excuse. To develop your top line you'll need to invest in developing your people.

Invite and encourage cognitive diversity in your organization

Paul Jacobs offers a writing that merits the attention of radio and TV leadership. Follow The (Shrinking) Money - his post on the Jacobs Media blog, is a call to action, to wit:

"...if we don't make major moves in our sales and marketing
strategies, we're in real trouble"

Read Paul's entire post, here. Kudos to Paul, he is right on the money. He presents a well-reasoned case for changing up the game and getting into a whole new reality, the competition that is measured media fighting for dollars at the dawn of the 21st century mediascape.

Congrats and cheers: Robert Feder, by far the best and brightest writer of his generation to cover the media beat, has returned. His new home is Vocalo.org, a new media venture of the Chicago Public Radio folks. More, in his own words, here. Welcome to the conversation, Rob. You've been missed.

Bonus: Cool kid Mary Meeker and her colleagues at Morgan Stanley delivered an important presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit. You may access the PDF of their presentation - Economy + Internet Trends - here. Bravos to Mary and the Morgan gang on a job well done.

Oldie but goodie: Malcolm Gladwell from 2004 on spaghetti sauce. Thanks, as ever, to TED.

2009-10-21T04:28:00.004-05:00

"Fear is the mortal enemy of creativity." Alex Bogusky

"Originality is deliberate and forced, and partakes of the nature of a protest." Eric Hoffer

"When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something...That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things." Steve Jobs

Today's image: Bart1 by Banksy. Great work. Thank you for sharing.

Minding the Gap

For those of us working in measured media, we are living in times of incredible disruption and, it seems to me, equally incredible opportunity. The question needing attention is how do we make the best of our present circumstances? How do we most effectively navigate the gap, from our past analog successes and through today's rough waters to the brave new digital frontier?

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein has provided us with an excellent guidebook. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Amzn). Her writing does an outstanding job of helping us to understand how technology can trigger dramatic and unimaginable change. Let me also suggest a fresh reading of Marshall McLuhan. Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines have produced an exceptional book pulling together McLuhan lectures and interviews in Understanding Me with a forward by the great American writer Tom Wolfe (Amzn)

In giving my talks on social media this year I have mentioned some conventional radio station jobs (e.g., the overnight, midday and part-time weekend disc jockey) using the metaphor of 15th century scribes (inspired by the brilliant Michael Rosenblum). Getting a job working for the church as a scribe was about as good as it could get way back in the day. It was the ultimate job security, working for the rock solid employer of choice. And then, everything changed. Working as a liner reading announcer now seems an anomaly, an occupational accident of pure chance. In the not too distant future winning a bar bet suggesting that people once made a wage good enough to support a family and buy a home by simply playing music (and little more than reading formatted remarks four times an hour) will be, well, practically impossible.

My father was a musician and did some work in radio. When TV came along the musicians union told its members that their radio jobs would be safe. When it was suggested that radio would replace live musical performances by playing recordings - the same phonograph records available for purchase by the listeners - the union said "Radio intends to play the same records that the public can buy and play whenever they wish? It will never work." To my knowledge, there are no musicians on staff at any radio stations today. By the way, my dad reinvented himself. He decided to end his successful career as a musician and band leader, he took a flyer and went off to play the records. He never looked back. Johnny Martin had the audacity to ignore the conventional wisdom and the accepted rules of the day, he helped to put on the air the first black owned radio station in the nation, WERD in Atlanta. It happened this month in 1949.

Don't Keep Calm and Carry On

The important challenge of broadcast managers today is minding the gap, building a bridge to the digital future and that's a mission that will require first creating a magnet, a culture that fosters innovation. Broadcasters must attract the best ideas.

While there is certainly a lot of talk about the challenges and problems of our current situation there is far too little discussion and resources focused on actual solutions. Too often activity is being mistaken for progress. There's not enough implementation, experimentation, effective execution. We must adopt a dead serious bias for action. Discovering solution sets should be the proper focus most deserving of our attention. Please permit me to again say ... It's not about getting better, it's about getting different. It's all about shifting focus from the numerator to the denominator.

As it happens we have an app for that today. Edison Media's Tom Webster recently presented a wonderful webinar - A Small, Good Thing - on behalf of the Conclave. You may access a recording of Tom's webinar, here. Word to the wise - put Tom's blog, BrandSavant, in your reader, it's here. [FD: I serve on the board of the Conclave. Let me also thank and credit moleitau for his killer image shown here above left]

Bonus: Cool kid Alex Bogusky has some good writing on offer - Creative directors are in the business of professional insanity - well worth your bandwidth, here.

Wait, there's more: Still feel the need to read? Check out what I've been reading via delicious, here.

2009-10-08T18:18:00.001-05:00

"No one cares about how much you know until they know how much you care." Jerry McGee

"Hire slowly. Fire quickly. It's not the people you fire that hurt you. It's the people you don't fire." Marcio Moreira

"Don't get intimidated by the world out there. Most people don't have a clue." Dennis Scully

Today's image: Banksy by Martin in London. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

Please take 16:31 to watch today's video feature. It's a wonderful talk by Beau Lotto, the founder of Lottolab studio. Opticial illusions show how we see. My thanks, as always, to TED.

"Beau Lotto's color games puzzle your vision, but they also spotlight what you can't normally see: how your brain works. This fun, first-hand look at your own versatile sense of sight reveals how evolution tints your perception of what's really out there."

"Why is context everything?"

No one is an outside
observer of nature

Each of us is defined
by our ecology

...ecology is necessarily
relative, historical and empirical

2009-10-01T22:24:00.005-05:00

"Creativity is thinking new things. Innovation is doing new things." Theodore Levitt

"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing more to take away." Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it, nobody knows how. When it's finally done, there is surprise it's not better." Avinash Kaushick

Today's image: Think, Create, Experience by Amanda Mac. Very cool shot. Thanks for sharing.

Allow me to again suggest that in matters related to media and marketing we are living in times of dramatic fundamental change, incredible disruption, amazing opportunity.

Recently I picked up Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews by Marshall McLuhan. Edited by Stephanie McLuhan and David Staines, with a forward by the gifted writer Tom Wolfe. It's a wonderful read. [Amzn info]

From a McLuhan lecture at Georgetown University in 1964...

"In moving from the neolithic age to the electronic age, we move from the mode of the wheel to the mode of the circuit, from the lineal single-plane organization of experience to the pattern of feedback and circuitry and involvement. During the many centuries of specialist technology, man cultivated habits of detachment and indifference to the social consequences of his new specialist technologies. In the age of circuitry, the consequences of any action occur at the same time as the action. Thus we now experience a growing need to build the very consequences of our programs into the original design and to put the consumer into the production process. By awakening to the significance of electronic feedback, we have become intensely aware of the meaning and effect of our actions after centuries of comparative heedlessness and non-involvement....Electricity made possible the extension of the human nervous system as a new social environment."

Which brings us to a fresh and much discussed batch of feedback deserving of your attention.

Tom Webster and Larry Rosen, cool kids in residence at Edison Media Research, have posted some writing with merit. Invest the bandwidth, thank me later. Radio's Looming Crisis Is Not Digital by Tom, here. Radio's Stimulus Package by Larry, here. Coming to a browser near you soon - the Tom Webster Conclave webinar, details available here. [FD: I serve on the Conclave board]

Recommended radio read: Turn It Up! American Radio Tales 1946 - 1996 by Bob Shannon. Fifty-eight chapters of fun. From Lee Abrams to Wolfman Jack with a cast of stars including Chuck Blore, Jerry Boulding, Dick Clark, Rick Dees, Tom Donahue, Bill Drake, Paul Drew, Bill Figenshu, Bob Henabery, Tom Joyner, Casey Kasem, Larry Lujack, Gordon McLendon, Bobby Rich, John Rook, Ed Salamon, Scott Shannon, Fred Winston and over thirty others. Check out Fred Winston's free podcast about the amazing Dick Biondi, get more info and order your copy of the book, here. [FD: I serve as an unpaid adviser to the author]

2009-09-30T21:14:00.015-05:00

"Hire execs who love the product." Dave Winer

"Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity and truth accomplishes no victories without it." Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm." Winston Churchill

Today's image: Banksy. Cans Festival Leake Street SE1 by pomphorhynchus. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.

Good to be back. So much to catch up on. Let's get started.

Dave Winer inspired this post. Should you not be aware of Dave, please do get to know him. He was instrumental in bringing us game-changing breakthroughs including blogging, RSS and podcasting. He's an original thinker, a person not afraid of dealing in that most rare and refreshing of attitudes, he dares to offer unvarnished thought. You may find his blog, Scripting News, here. Longtime readers will recall the header of this blog once contained Dave's wise counsel "People come back to places that send them away." That has never been more true or relevant than it is today.

Recently Dave wrote: "Every crop of entrepreneurs thinks it's different. They never are, but they have to learn that for themselves. One thing they do over and over is hire execs who don't love the product. It's as if the guy who ran professional football didn't like football." My sense is Dave is spot-on in this observation. Read Dave's entire post, Hire execs who love the product, here.

Seems to me too many of those working in broadcast today don't truly love the product. Should we somehow be given the ability to Mirandize the majority of broadcast leadership, have them raise a hand and give us the straight dope under oath, my sense is our finding would be there ain't a lot of love. These guys are not happy, not having fun, not excited about the industry as it is today and not close to convincingly enthusiastic regarding the road ahead. Can't totally blame them. It's not the job they signed up for. Moreover, 2009 is turning out to be yet another one of those years that they would prefer we all just agree to forget. More on this leadership issue later.

Today, let us choose to learn rather than forget.

Here now the lessons of a media company about one hundred and thirty years old that put down one of it's most prized assets earlier this year. The Rocky Mountain News printed it's final edition on February 27, 2009.

At that ending, John Temple was the editor, president and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News. Now he presents us with an exceptional gift - lessons learned from the end of an institution. Here are his ten lessons. I strongly recommend you visit his blog, watch his video and read his entire presentation delivered earlier today at the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit at Google. [Speakers list]

1. Know what business you're in.
2. Know your customers.
3. Know your competition.
4. Know your goal.
5. Have a strategy and be committed to pursuing it.
6. Measure, measure, measure.
7. Keep new ventures free from the rules of the old.
8. Let the people running a new venture do what's best for their business, regardless of the potential impact on the old.
9. To compete in a new medium, you have to understand it.
10. Invest in R&D.

Bravos, John. Well done. Thanks for sharing. This gentleman loved his product, loved his job, of that there can be no doubt. His leading by example, his generous offering of learning, is simply exemplary. You may find John's post, including video, slides and the text of his presentation, here.

Thanks, again, to Dave Wine r for the inspiration and to NYU rock star Jay Rosen for his tip on John's wonderful gift of learning.

Your comments are always welcome.

More tomorrow. Thank you for stopping by.

2009-08-29T16:55:00.036-05:00

"Every creative act is a sudden cessation of stupidity." Edwin Land

"For people who live in the imagination, there is no lack of subjects. To seek for the exact moment at which inspiration comes is false. Imagination floods us with suggestions all the time, from all directions." Federico Fellini

"Creativity often consists of merely turning up what is already there. Did you know that right and left shoes were thought up only a little over a century ago?" Bernice Fitz-Gibbon

Today's image: Land, Sea and Sky by -Wink - Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

The Obvious

The obvious remains the hardest to see.

Take, for example, the goaltender mask used in ice hockey. The so-called goalie mask was created by Jacques Plante in 1959. While the goaltender mask may seem an obvious (and necessary) piece of equipment, it was not a part of the sport during hockey's first one hundred years of play.

Obvious and, for over one hundred years, hard to see until Jacques - tired of getting hit - said enough!

What problems are holding back your organization? What challenges are preventing your success? Enough! Imagine the needed and effective solution set to be the obvious.

"Perspective is worth ten IQ points."
Gary Hamel

We tend to get lost in the detail for the same reasons fish do not see water (it's an invisible part of their experience). Over time, we become fish in the water of our assumptions. It's a filter issue. We tend to lose perspective we once had when our ears, eyes and attention - our senses - were fresh, new to the market or new to the business card. The acuity at our command is influenced, our perceptions biased when we are immersed in the press of daily affairs - the problems, the personalities, the politics. The danger is we fall into the trap of no longer questioning market/company/industry dogma. This is the easy evil that is acceptance, allowing what is to continue; it's the inertia, the stasis, that deafens and blinds before it kills. It's acceptance that fuels the most creative rationale for failure. We hire on as defense counsel for the familiar, we go to work as advocates for what's smart, right about staying the course. We favor zone of comfort lock-in. In that process we too often champion the best of yesterday (optimization) when we should be competing for tomorrow (innovation).

When the new kids in school ask "Why do we do that?" or "Why do we do things this way?" it's an engine warning light coming on. Be alert, pay attention to the naive. LISTEN.

My suggestion is you rethink your situation and begin by asking...

W H Y ?

That's an important question we need to be asking way more often. In my experience, the best practice is to ask "why" daily. Test assumptions. Discuss "the rules" out loud, adopt a policy of brutal honesty.

Kevin Kelly has written a fine piece, Ratcheting Up Autonomy, on why we usually don't lose technologies. While it's current fashion to proclaim practically all media things dead (e.g., print, radio, TV), Kevin's writing offers some much needed perspective. Highly recommended, read it, here.

Closed circuit to rock radio: Ready for the fall sweep? Would you be interested in learning how to get better ratings? Want to improve fourth quarter sales? Need some unvarnished input as you begin your 2010 planning? Let me suggest you invite Lee Arnold to your market. Have him listen to your station and your market for a day then have him spend a second day with your team. On the second day share your thinking, your strategy, your plans. Programming, marketing, sales. Listen to what he has to say. Gain the competitive advantage of his perspective, let his recommendations encourage candid discussion and action. You'll benefit from this investment. Get Lee's contact info, here.

Bonus: Are you having fun? Must-see video. The Eight Irresistible Principles of Fun, here.

2009-08-28T06:15:00.005-05:00

"Leadership is the process of achieving a dream together, especially when that dream seems impossible to achieve." Stan Shih

"A leader has to be one of two things: he either has to be a brilliant visionary himself, a truly creative strategist, in which case he can do what he likes and get away with it; or else he has to be a true empowerer who can bring out the best in others." Henry Mintzberg

"A leader is a man who has the ability to get other people to do what they don't want to do and like it." Harry Truman

Today's image: The girl from Ipanema loves Summer by neloqua. Great image. Thank you for sharing.

Data from the latest Forrester Social Technographics Profile has dropped. Check out the widget below.

For an explanation of the groups (Creators, Critics, etc.) view the eight slide presentation, here. My thanks to Josh Bernoff and the Groundswell team. Read Josh's overview, Social technology growth marches on in 2009, led by social network sites, here.

2009-08-24T13:45:00.003-05:00

"The way out of the recession is not to wait for an uptick. The way out is to create your own uptick." Rance Crain

"Talent is the desire to practice." Malcolm Gladwell

"Nothing will work, but everything might. Now’s the time for lots and lots of experiments." Clay Shirky

Today's image: shoot it!! by Mitra Mirshahidi. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Another very cool video from TED. Dan Pink makes the argument that ye olde carrot and stick management is a total waste of time. Clearly, Dan gets it. He suggests it's all about the "mismatch between what science knows and what business does." You may preorder Dan's new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, via Amazon, here.

2009-08-19T06:09:00.019-05:00

"Professionals require little direction and supervision. What they do require is protection and support." Henry Mintzberg

"To be mission-based means that those in positions of authority are not the source of authority." Peter Senge

"Administrators are cheap and easy to find and cheap to keep. Leaders - risk takers: they are in very short supply. And ones with vision are pure gold." Raymond W. Smith

Today's image: Radio Daze by Ian Hayhurst. Wonderful shot. Thanks for sharing.

Measuring the right things

Yesterday's post was all about activity, some aspects of ad selling. It failed to recognize or address a very important issue - what we measure. What gets measured gets managed. Moreover, what gets measured gets attention, gets fussed over, gets precious share of mind.

Sales is a process, not an event.

Parts of generally accepted broadcast sales management practice appear to be broken. Some would go further and say things are getting scary anachronistic in our sales operations. This includes many of the most commonly used operating metrics. If your legacy systems are not helping you they are hurting you.

"The ultimate form of progress...is learning to decide what is working
and what is not."
John Freeman

One of the first things we do when working with new clients is develop a dashboard, that project starts with an inventory of metrics. The dashboard data prompts us to ask three questions.

1. What is happening?
2. What is not happening?
3. What can we do to influence the action?

Let me suggest it's the dashboards, our scorecards and the accounting, that need serious attention. What and how we measure deserves studied work. My thought is, we need an informed, measured rethink on what favorable results look/feel like. What results will be key, what activity most productive, what solution sets most effective, as we prepare to engage in and win the new games now emerging on the ever changing mediascape (one which is, more or less, in permanent beta).

What we allow we encourage

Standards (expectations) > Activity (process) > Outcome (results) > Consequence (reward/discipline) > Learning (reflection/refinement)

In my experience, success or failure is directly related to the right beginning, setting standards. Legendary sales developer Ken Greenwood, using golf as a metaphor, recommends an early asking of the question "What is par?" It remains a question of critical importance.

Still, as ever, Drucker comes to mind, job one has never been more clear ... "Management is responsible for producing results."

Optimization absent innovation is a trap of diminishing return. Permit me to say that learning and unlearning should have prominent places on your agenda, if not you're dead.

It's adapt or die (alternatively, as Hugh MacLeod counsels, "Create or die.") Don't settle for managing decline, there's no future in it. Lucky for us all we are living in the most interesting, exciting and promising of times.

Readers are leaders: Please preorder the new Daniel H. Pink book. Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us. Thank me later. Amzn info

Thank you very much: Appreciate all of you who were kind enough to get in touch about yesterday's post. Always good to hear from broadcast sellers, managers and group execs. What was totally unexpected and wonderful was hearing from so many at work on the front lines of retail. Each of you guys made my day. I promise to be in touch. Please give me some time to get back to you. Again, thanks. Your thoughts, comments are always welcome and appreciated.

On the day job we remain knee deep in the study and application of social media. Seems there's a new SocM video or ppt deck being posted almost every week, new stats continue to arrive around the clock. Behold, the velocity of change (or in the least our attempts at tracking it) continues unabated. Here's one of the better mashups, titled Socialnomics09 ...

2009-08-18T07:51:00.021-05:00

"There are a hundred roads to Rome; the important thing is to get there, not to use the same road." Herb Kelleher

"Without some element of leadership, the many at the bottom will be paralyzed with choices." Kevin Kelly

"The genius of a good leader is to leave behind him a situation which common sense, without the grace of genius, can deal with successfully." Walter Lippmann

Today's image: Alone After the Rain by imagonovus. Great capture. Thank you for sharing.

Adventures in Ad Sales
Dirty little secrets from the front

One of the benefits of owning a small retail business is getting an up-close and personal view of local media sales practices. During the almost five years we have been open for business it's fair to say we have just about heard it all from media sellers and their managers. Informed by our playing with live ammo situation, my sense (which continues to be confirmed) is media sales organizations are their own worst enemies.

Today a story, a few suggestions and, count them, four links you should check out.

Recently a TV seller for one of the big four affiliates stopped in to pitch a package. She left behind ten pages supporting her offer. The summary format, one we see frequently, was structured as follows:

Total Spots
Total Value
Total Cost
Total Savings

She said she needed a decision ASAP because the schedule had to begin the following week.

When asked why we were being pitched the package she explained that time was short and they were pitching local TV advertisers who were already running on WWWW (her competitor). This was important because our creative was already executed, all we needed to do was ask our WWWW rep to provide her station with a copy. We were good to go, no production required.

The "total savings" featured on option summary pages ranged from 35 to 40 percent depending on the option selected.

She called to follow up. We said thank you but we were taking a pass. We again stated the objection made at the time of her in-person pitch - "our 2009 ad budget is already fully committed." We also reminded her that we were previously, for years, an annual advertiser with her station.

She said "We really need to sit down and talk about things. We are doing well in the ratings, they're much better. We have new management, the staff has changed and we are much more professional. Our customer service has improved. We need to sit down and talk about next quarter, I'm sure I can help you."

She was again told, thanks but no, thank you. We are fully committed for the remainder of 2009.

At this point in the call the line goes dead. Silence. [Cue the crickets]

We do give her credit for one thing. At that moment, she did not invoke what we have come to call the media seller's rejoinder of choice (i.e., "You're making a big mistake"). In sum, our finding is she wasted her time and ours. She was simply not adequately trained or prepared. My thought is these are symptoms of a leadership problem. Her managers are culpable.

Here are ten suggestions for sales leadership and savvy sellers. Please understand...

1. Nothing about your station is important to the retailer.

2. The important thing to the retailer is their enterprise. The one thing that every retailer cares about most, wants to talk about in depth with anyone willing to listen, is their business. Hint - no one they know seems to care about it as much as they do and/or are tired of hearing about it.

3. Retailers sell second for a living, they buy first for a living. When you attempt to sell a retailer you find yourself across the table from a highly skilled professional buyer. When calling on a business not on your air please remember that no matter what you are selling it will first be thought of as an additional, unexpected and unnecessary expense.

4. Retailers are always suspicious of whole dollar pricing. Everything they buy is priced in dollars and cents. Why do media sellers consistently round up? (Thank you to Kevin B. Sweeney for that important lesson)

5. Mind the old saw: Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice.

6. Successful retailers plan their work and work their plan. The average planning horizon is expressed in months and quarters.

7. New business cold calling with fire sale packages is unlucky. See numbers 5 and 6.

8. Stop telling retailers how good your business is. They are able to see and hear how good it actually is at will. When they watch prime filled with promos or hear a morning drive without spots you have seriously jeopardized your credibility. Be modest. Tell them you're doing your best in this environment and share some client success stories.

9. Testimonials from your clients are pure gold. There is no better reference for your station than a happy local retailer. Recency is key here.

10. Under-promise, over-deliver. Consistently.

The major problems with this specific sales call may be found in its motivation and timing. Here we are witness to an example of management using competitive intel to target prospects with a package that may or may not be relevant/attractive and doing so under the last minute pressures of a ticking perishable inventory clock. My guess would be this is yet another month of things just not going well for the guys at that station. Imagine the discussion. "There's no appetite for our discounted prime inventory, oh well, it must be the economy."

Never say never, exception number 94:
Never confuse activity with progress

Please allow me to offer final thoughts on this issue. The way out for this seller and her peers, for station managers and for their owners will require courage and commitment. The first step is to stop doing what no longer produces the expected result. In the main, broadcasters must stop getting up in the morning and heading to the station with the primary mission of killing the guys across the street. Broadcasters must abandon the patently wrong pov that internecine warfare is productive best practice. This pursuit is a senseless zero sum game and clearly less and less effective. Moreover, it's a potentially dangerous dead end. Using competitive intel restricted to your direct competitors is silo thinking that blinds, it limits potential by its very design. Fighting for larger shares of a smaller and smaller pie is plainly irrational. A sustainable business model this is not, it's a flawed strategy long past its best used by date. The truth be known, local markets are rich with ad spend. It's a big market out there. You can be a victim, a captive to an industry segment gone weak or you can refuse to play that role and get busy doing something different. Have the audacity to break from the industry dogma and rote behavior. To begin getting your unfair share you'll need to do the hard work that working smart demands and you'll need to persevere. Courage is the power to let go of what's familiar.

One more word on retailers. They don't want to be sold but they love to buy. All the best to you. Game on. Please, give it a go.

P.S. We think the world of the local media sellers we work with. We believe strongly in the game-changing power of advertising. Local broadcast, print and online continue to yield excellent returns on our investment, they are helping to grow our business year after year.

Best practice: Want to read about a great, no make that an amazing promotion? Take a minute and get a lesson from one of the finest minds in American retailing history. How to make money with your promotions. A tale from my salad days with RKO Radio in Chicago, here.

Bonus: The annual Mindset List has arrived from the good folk at Beloit College as we officially welcome the Class of 2013. Always an interesting read, it's here. Kudos to team Mindset!

Clues from a cool kid: When it comes to any discussion concerning brands and branding, the go to guy is Tom Asacker. He's simply one of the best and brightest. You'll find his latest thought piece, A Brand is Not a Separate Thing, available via PDF, here. Tom's blog, a clear eye, is a gem and may be found here. Bravos, Tom. Well said.

Riddle me this, Batman: Who Are The Trust Agents for Your Station? Tom Webster, the digital-dean-in-residence at Edison Media Research provides some thoughts and along the way suggests a killer must-read, here. Thanks, Tom.

2009-08-17T12:12:00.002-05:00

"Leadership is about a sense of direction. It's knowing what the next step is." John Adair

"Leaders walk their talk; in true leaders there is no gap between the theories they espouse and their practice." Warren Bennis

"The art of leadership is to mobilize people to care about the tasks ahead." Doris Kearns Goodwin

Today's image: The Sun Sets on Chateau de Chillon by Pear Biter. Amazing. Thanks for sharing.

Art & Copy, a film by Doug Pray. It's about advertising. I am not able to get enough of George Lois. George is, truly, one of the very best Mad Men, evah. The film's site is here.

2009-08-15T10:30:00.004-05:00

"If your business plan depends on suddenly being 'discovered' by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain." Hugh MacLeod

"Google has become a verb." David Weinberger

"The world today is full of MLOTT (money left on the table)." Doc Searls

Today's image: IMG_3884 by Max Lieberwirth. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

Bonus: 6 Essential Skills for Exponential Times by Michelle Tripp via The BrandForward Blog, here.

2009-08-12T15:34:00.010-05:00

"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevancy even less." General Eric Shinseki

"Mark my words, folks: we're all being seduced by a dangerous and sexy online mistress named Social. If you haven't fallen for her yet, you will." Dave McClure

"Markets are conversations." Doc Searls

Today's image: Untitled by Medeia. Amazing shot. Thank you for sharing.

Three books for your consideration. Each is highly recommended, especially for broadcasters and media folk.

The Chaos Scenario. Amid the Ruins of Mass Media, The Choice for Business is Stark: Listen or Perish. - Bob Garfield [TheChaosScenario] Amzn info

The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web. - Tamar Weinberg [Techipedia] Amzn info

The Cluetrain Manifesto. 10th Anniversary Edition. - Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger [Cluetrain] Amzn info

Bonus: The ever engaging Marta Kagan and gang at the integrated marketing agency Expresso have updated their popular presentation What the F**k Is Social Media. View the deck (via slideshare) here. Bravos to Marta!

2009-08-11T05:32:00.018-05:00

"It would be a great mistake to confine your imagination to the way things have always been done. In fact, it would consign you to the mediocrity of the marketplace." Harold Geneen

"The moment a person forms a theory his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory." Thomas Jefferson

"I dream for a living." Steven Spielberg

Today's image: If The Key Fits by pareeerica. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Again, chasing those three tenets of new media for broadcasters. Ensure your assets are digital, discoverable and ready to share.

Today, we'll unpack discoverable.

Like it or don't Google is your home page (as previously suggested). Increasingly, your home page is becoming less relevant. Attention must be focused on making each web page stand out and stand alone. This is a shift in the conventional strategy, from optimization of the home page to the landing page.

Incoming! Analytics are your friend, they are very important to you. No matter what you are now running, please do add Google Analytics to your mix. Using this blog as an example, a consistent 50% of traffic is being directed via search engine to a specific post, rather than the main page. This seems to be, generally, a good representative average provided the available evidence including the metrics of our clients worldwide. Your mileage may vary - so do check it. Now, back to the countdown. Google is driving the largest share of SE traffic to this blog, followed by (a distant second) Yahoo!, then google.co.uk, blogsearch.google.com, google.ca, google.com.au, google.co.in, google.nl, google.fr, well, all those other Googles, you get the idea. To be fair, search.aol.com, bing.com and others do direct traffic this way but they are, at present, driving combined contributions that register a single digit percentage in total SE referrals. Now, and in the near future, it's safe to wager we are playing a game of Google.

So Google your brand. Google your talent. Google your key attributes. Google those words and combination of words that are important to you. Start with "I'm Feeling Lucky" and only then move to the SERP. Then, only the first page counts. Study. Take notes. Take action to improve your performance. Test, test, test. Measure. When "Lucky" produces your pages, you win (in that moment). Please do remember, the equation is dynamic. This is some new form of chess we are all playing and what it clearly is not is any simple game of checkers. In the brave new world of real-time, walk away time is collapsing. As a practical matter, incumbency is meaningless.

As the gifted Count Basie said "One more once."

It's not a game of getting better but one of getting different. The key for broadcasters, those in search of the most effective solution set, is to focus less on the numerator and more on the denominator. Game on.

Misc data: Month after month, the number one most-viewed page on this blog continues to be the amazing original writing of 2004 by the brilliant Bob Henabery, my creative godfather and mentor. Bob writes about media legends Bill Drake and Rick Sklar...Top 40, The Fox and the Hedgehog, it's a great read, here. The second most-viewed is my 2004 update of an earlier monograph on leadership, A Great General Manager, here.

Sidebar: Following Brent D Payne, SEO of Tribune, on Twitter I noticed his tweet about his new boss. Brent had been reporting to the CTO, and tweeted that his new boss was Trib's COO. When I asked him about it he said via email "It was mainly done to focus me more on monetization an (sic) product versus technical changes to the CMS." My take is this is one very savvy move. Tribune groks the notion, the true business value of search. My congrats to Brent who is doing a wonderful job for team Trib. They are lucky to have him and would be wise to ensure his continued contribution. Closed circuit to Randy: lock in this gentleman and thank me later.

Congrats and cheers: Regular readers of this humble blog are aware of my great love for FriendFeed. It remains my feeling that FriendFeed is one of the great killer apps in social media. It's not only a killer app but it is, as well, a wonderful community of folk like no other. While many in the community are suggesting that FriendFeed being acquired by Facebook will be the end of an era, my thought is we're gonna be just fine thank you very much. Facebook will be better as will FriendFeed. That's my story and I'm sticking to it until proven wrong. Congrats, cheers, bravos and kudos to the FriendFeed and Facebook gangs. Here's hoping you guys knock the cover clean off the ball.

Extra credit: The Flow Past Web: even better than the RealTime thing, here.

Bonus: Steven Wright killed on Letterman last night. He threw a bunch of classic stuff including...A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths. - Enjoy, pages of some of his best, here.

2009-08-10T13:32:00.011-05:00

"You know you've got a good piece of software when people use it for purposes for which the designers never intended or designed for." Clay Shirky

"Doing anything worthwhile takes forever. Ninety percent of what separates successful people and failed people is time, effort and stamina." Hugh MacLeod

"Don't tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results." George S. Patton, Jr.

Today's image: The Passage of Time by ToniVC. Amazing shot. Thanks for sharing.

Three tenets of new media for broadcasters: Your assets must be digital, discoverable and ready to share.

Today, more on ready to share.

The great broadcast pioneer Gordon McLendon famously said to his managers "Get people to talk about your radio station." Few in media have understood and employed the power of "word of mouth" marketing more effectively than did McLendon. Moreover, he developed and practiced the radio stunt as performance art. I learned a bunch about McLendon thanks to the legendary Texas radio man Dickie Rosenfeld. Dickie once worked for The Old Scotchman as a seller, sales manager and general manager at KILT in Houston. As Dickie told me "Everything we did was designed to get people talking about KILT. Our goal was to be the talk of the town."

"Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about." Cory Doctorow

The italics above are mine. Cory's observation is spot on. Getting into (and staying a credible part of) the conversation is the ball game. This is what McLendon and his managers had down cold.

Today we have the advantages of the web to help us spread the news, get the word out. As Hugh MacLeod writes...

..."Great Content" is only half the story. The other half is just as important, though a little more subtle. And what is that?

Short Answer: "Sociality".

It's not just that Boing Boing's content is fun to READ. It is. It's also that Boing Boing's content is fun to SHARE...Boing Boing has a lot of "Sociality" baked-in, i.e. its content makes for great "Social Objects" i.e. their blog posts are great "Sharing Devices". We are primates. We are social creatures. We like to socialize. And we socialize around objects. Boing Boing cranks out "social objects" by the ton, that we can effortlessly pass along to our friends.

Read Hugh's entire post, Boing Boing and baked-in sociality etc, here. Bravos to Hugh. He well makes this very important point.

Get into the conversation, ensure that your content is ready (and easy) to share. Think export.

Bonus: The (Not So) Final Word by Doug Zanger. Doug offers his take on the state of broadcast radio and the creative business, here. The Advertising Life podcast hosted by Doug Zanger...he invited me to guest on Episode 5, the audio is here. My thanks to Doug. It was fun getting to play on his stage.

A DJ speaks out: Guest Commentary: An Open Letter to Radio Programmers By Tara Dublin via Oregon Media Central, here

Today's big buzz is Facebook buying FriendFeed. More by Jason Kincaid via TechCrunch, here. I <3 FriendFeed.

2009-08-05T06:20:00.010-05:00

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." G.K. Chesterton

"By definition, risk-takers often fail. So do morons. In practice it's difficult to sort them out." Scott Adams

"Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of values." Michael Porter

Today's image: To Miss You by michelleBlack. Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing.

Today, more lessons learned from the ongoing development, presentation, discussion and refinement of my social media brief.

"If the news is that important, it will find me."

Those are the oft quoted words of an unknown college student. The student threw out that insightful gem while participating in a focus group conducted by researcher Jane Buckingham. The quotation itself became widely known thanks, in large measure, to an article by Timesman Brian Stelter (Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On, NYT 3/27/08)

The attitude, the expectation, inherent in that quotation signals a significant shift in relationships and responsibilities. What is really at work here represents a profound sea change in media behaviors. The definitions, patterns and rule sets of consumption are in various stages of transition or disruption as some have suggested.

As a practical matter, consumption (the economic activity of purchase) is being redefined. My sense is we are moving from generations of media built on businesses premised on attraction (i.e., importing readers, listeners and viewers) to a wholly new generation of media, a nascent mediascape, in which business models are fundamentally different. Success is a moving target predicated on issues of multi-channel distribution (exporting). A world of one-to-many is adding another layer or two, new constructs, many-to-one and many-to-many and all the while one-to-one connecting is experiencing nothing less than a renaissance. Thank you, Facebook.

Import + Export

It is still important but no longer good enough for a successful media company to simply attract readers, listeners and viewers to a single specific newspaper, radio/TV station, cable channel or web site. The concept of reach, critical to the measured media enterprise, is moving beyond a single definition, it's embracing multiple interpretations. It's a new and different game; like going from the 2D chess we know and understand to that 3D chess of Star Trek. From readers, listeners and viewers reaching for our content to an audience also being reached by our content. Continuing to invite and direct attention to our place while also working to become a part of their places. Now in play...a new sense of place. Moreover, recent anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that while consumers are continuing to elect one or more traditional channels (soliloquies) they are adding to their media mix, they are participating (if only by observation) in one or more related conversations.

The entire notion of how consumer media transactions are conducted is changing. Dan Gillmor first referred to consumers as, "the people formerly known as the audience." Increasingly, these folks are in the game. What makes this difficult for some to grok is the so-called old media are not just going away. The new media, the emerging forms, are additive and sometimes appear to be the old media in the throes of some evolutionary process. Print = text, radio = audio, TV = video. The biggest issue for media managers is one of legacy, it's a matter of an accepted tradition of control. Jeff Jarvis, a former dead tree exec turned digital evangelist, has proffered a law, to wit: "Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will." (Read more: The People Formerly Known as the Audience by Jay Rosen. June 2006)

For decades research was tasked with measuring media (s)elections, preferences of consumption after the fact. What ad did you notice? What station did you listen to? What program did you watch? As we move deeper into the new reality, the brave new world of hyper-connected real-time, the heads-up display, the dashboard, trumps looking in the rear view mirror.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
R. Buckminster Fuller

Going forward, the significant matters that deserve the considered attention of media management include mobile (the new black) and ensuring that all assets are...

Digital

Discoverable

Ready to share

Next time: Why Tribune made a very smart move in changing their SEO's supervisor from the CTO to the COO. Plus, my thesis of Ready to share benefits from a practical illustration in the Hugh MacLeod concept of Sociality.

Bonus: Quotetrain #1 The new normal is that we expect businesses to listen to us. The companies that don’t are now perceived as Dinosaurs. - David Weinberger.

Spinning in the Grave. The three biggest reasons music magazines are dying. Jonah Weiner writes all about it in Slate, here.

2009-08-03T16:20:00.038-05:00

"In the technology industry, change is a constant so it feels like there is always a gun to your head...You quickly learn you have to either adapt or die." Marc Andreessen

"A handful of men have become very rich by paying attention to details most others ignored." Henry Ford

"As we get older and more experienced, we overestimate the accuracy of our judgments..." Malcolm Gladwell

Today's image: drama queen 2 by ash.g Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

Word on the tweet
(It smells like money)

Social media: some lessons learned over the months of presenting my brief. Big and small ventures are making money using creative social media strategies. Today we note two firms using Twitter to generate business.

On Twitter, Dell Outlet has 967,871 followers (@DellOutlet). Naked Pizza has 5,329 followers (@NAKEDpizza). Dell does business worldwide. Naked Pizza is a one-location enterprise in New Orleans. Both have developed approaches to effectively monetize Twitter.

As reported in Ad Age (Twitter Proves Its Worth as a Killer App for Local Business by Abbey Klaassen), in a test run on April 23rd, "an exclusive-to-Twitter promotion brought in 15% of the day's business."

Naked Pizza is micro-targeting. They're marketing to people within a three-mile radius of their shop. As shown in the photo at left, they have put up a billboard featuring the Twitter logo with the line "Follow us for specials" and their Twitter handle. This new creative replaced their previous, more conventional, "call for delivery" message.

A second Twitter-only promotion ran on May 29th asking customers to mention Twitter when ordering. That promotion set an overall one-day sales record. "68.6% of total dollar sales came from customers who said 'I'm calling from Twitter.' (Pizza by tweet by Richard Slawsky)

Stay tuned. The little outfit that promises the "World's Healthiest Pizza" and is devoted to creating "Pizza 2.0" may be going national. They enjoy the good fortune of having net savvy Mark Cuban as one of their investors.

We go from the single DMA Mom-and-Pop to the successful global brand that is Dell Computers. The cool kids at Dell Outlet are making millions on Twitter. By offering Twitter-exclusive deals and deep linking to coupons, Dell is able to track traffic and sales originating via Twitter. As of this writing, Dell has attributed over three million dollars in sales to their DellOutlet Twitter channel. (See this earlier article on Mashable, Making Millions via Twitter by Ben Parr)

There's no good reason why you should not be using your digital assets, including social media, to generate business. A media client we work with is in the process of a major site makeover. They have replaced their web site with a single splash page containing a link to their Twitter page. Twitter has become their primary web communications channel. Not surprisingly they are gaining followers daily. Most important, they have conducted several very successful Twitter-only promotions that are leading them to wonder "Why didn't our expensive web site produce these kind of results?" Good question. What exactly are you doing to build your business on Twitter?

Extra credit: 62 Ways to Use Twitter for Business by Meryl Evans, Web Worker Daily.

Good stuff: Direct from the Twitter gang - Twitter 101 for Business - A Special Guide.

P L A Y

Getting truly serious about your Twitter (and any of the other social media) starts with getting totally serious about that four letter word.

Mind the words of John Cleese "If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play."

Read about the amazing power of play: play. How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown, M.D. (Amzn info)

We're all making this stuff up as we go forward

(What's important is you're in the game, your team is playing. As Woody Allen famously said "Eighty percent of success is showing up.")

P.S. for broadcasters. Helping your clients get the best return from their social media initiatives begins with leading by example(s).

P.S.S. Please read this, study this, share this, discuss this > I now pronounce you monetized: A YouTube video case study, here. Related parody: JK Divorce Entrance Dance (natch).

Bonus: The Malcolm Gladwell quote used at the top of today's post was taken from his recent writing in The New Yorker - Cocksure. Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence. It's a good read which you may find here.

Wayback bonus: Remembering Milwaukee rock radio in the 1980s. Sometimes floods are good by radio programming and marketing ace Lee Arnold. (July 2006), here.

Danna Walker, Ph.D. The Seven Laws of Journalism - This Semester 1. Journalism isn't dead 2. Money counts 3. Grow a pair 4. Life is hard (so deal with it) 5. You're a story factory 6. Use technology as a means to an end 7. Ok, the whole democracy thing (sorry).

Detritus: Number of times my talk on social media has been given - 26. Average rating (1-5) = 4.84 Average rating (1-10) = 9.23 Best comment (five scale) - "Can I give this a ten? WOW!!!...killer content...lots of solid very practical take away" Worst comment (five scale) - "Deserves a zero or maybe a minus 5...social media sucks way too much time and attention...the worst kind of fad media crap. Facebook will be gone by next year. Hello, Friendster, DUH...Next!...this was total waste of time." My favorite so far "The station kicking our butt at 11 could give a rats ass about Twitter or Facebook...110% of their energy is laser focused on crushing nightside not wasting time on stupid web junk or mobile app trash" (FYI - the station leading at 11 dominates both Facebook and Twitter among broadcasters in their metro, they also happen to have a pretty cool site given they are using an O&O template)

2009-07-28T14:03:00.013-05:00

"If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic." Bill Bernbach

"I got a great gimmick. Let's tell the truth." N.M. Ohrbach

"Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything." George Lois

Today's image: Heavenly Cowboy by running horse pictures. Amazing. Thank you for sharing.

Thank you very much

My social media brief has now been presented a bunch of times. It's been a fun experience and a great adventure in learning. The brief has been constantly improved thanks to constructive interaction before, during and after each talk. Preparing, updating, tweaking and giving the talk has introduced me to some gifted folks. These bright individuals have challenged me and in that process made my brief much stronger. The brief has been presented before a wide variety of participants at diverse venues including organized events/conferences (broadcasters, publishers, creative directors, government, private equity capital), corporate in-house training sessions, and senior management retreats. The brief has taken different forms from what is now my standard one-hour brief with Q&A to a four-hour workshop. Each talk was custom made, fine tuned for the occasion. So far, all talks have received excellent reviews.

As a result of the brief it has been my pleasure to meet folks who have invited me in, put me to work providing their teams with counsel on social media. My thought is the next couple of posts will be dedicated to sharing some lessons learned from those experiences. But, first...

A note about the important matter of respect. Setting the tone and the stage for creative success. Hint: It's all about the environment and the attitude.

This is not a dress rehearsal.
We are professionals.
This is the big time.

That was the sign once posted in the control room of WFYR, Chicago. While the origin and author is unknown, my recollection is the sign found me during my watch at WBZ. It was the first thing I posted in WFYR control after arriving from Boston as the new PD. My thanks to network radio star Dick Bartley who recalled the sign during his recent Ten Questions feature on the Joel Denver portal AllAccess.com (Back in the day, Dick was our midday personality)

The sign was part of a bigger creative makeover, one that started with a show of respect for talent. The staff needed to understand...the studio was a stage and not an office. We delivered performances rather than worked shifts. Other stations employed disc jockeys and announcers while ours was a creative home to performers. We came to work everyday to commit great radio. To paraphrase my friend Bobby Rich, the legendary radio icon, our attitude was "We're WFYR, anything else is just a radio station."

The right environment for creativity encourages and allows play.

Keeping things in perspective is key. Another sign. This one we posted in the conference room of our TV operation...

This is not a life saving hospital.
We are not looking for a cure for cancer.
This is only a TV station.
(It's FM radio with pictures)

If you are not able to laugh at yourself, not able to bring a healthy sense of humor to the situation, creativity will be scarce.

As Hugh MacLeod writes in his wonderful little book, Ignore Everybody And 39 Other Keys to Creativity (Amzn)

"None of this is rocket science. If I had to condense this entire book into a line or two, it would read something like, 'Work hard. Keep at it. Live simply and quietly. Remain humble. Stay positive. Create your own luck. Be nice. Be polite.'"

Word to the wise: Expecting nothing but the best works! Your expectations of people and their expectations of themselves are critical factors in how well people perform. As readers of this humble blog are aware I have a strong belief in the power of the Pygmalion effect. I do because it works. Embrace the notion and begin to enjoy the incredible effectiveness of servant leadership. Mind the words of the brilliant Dee Hock ... "If you don't understand that you work for your mislabeled 'subordinates,' then you know nothing of leadership. You know only tyranny."

Related: Pygmalion in Management by J. Sterling Livingston, Harvard Business Review, here. Servant Leadership by Robert K. Greenleaf, Amzn. One from Many: VISA and the Rise of the Chaordic Organization by Dee Hock, Amzn.

Bonus: Social Media Engagement And Financial Success Are Both Trailing Variables by Tom Webster via brandsavant, here. Highly recommended. Kudos, Tom and thanks for the mention.

Shameless self promotion dept: If you would like to learn more about my social media brief, new media workshops and their availability please get in touch using the Contact: My email link located in the left column of this page. Thank you.

2009-07-25T12:21:00.004-05:00

"I love radio. I have always loved radio. It’s a soundtrack. It’s a heart beat. It is more a part of real life than maybe any other signal written, visual or interactive. It has the best pictures." Gary Koelling

"The market for something to believe in is infinite." Hugh MacLeod

"The great creators - the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors - stood alone against the men of their time." Ayn Rand

Today's image: God by Nemo* Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Bravos: Fresh from the 2009 Conclave: the Gary Koelling presentation. His related prepared remarks may be found here. Well worth your bandwidth. My thanks to Gary for sharing and to Phil Wilson, who made Gary's Conclave appearance happen, for the tip

Signal Strength Presentation

View more documents from Gary Koelling.

2009-07-23T12:34:00.025-05:00

"Great ideas alter the power balance in relationships. That's why great ideas are initially resisted." Hugh MacLeod

"Every really new idea looks crazy at first." Alfred North Whitehead

"Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you only have one idea." Emile-August Chartier

Today's image: Road to heaven by fd. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Jeff Zucker is wrong

The NBCU chief is famously quoted as saying media companies were replacing "analog dollars with digital pennies" (which he later updated to the alliterative "digital dimes"). He's wrong.

Allow me to offer a passage from The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen (Highly recommended, Amzn):

"Established firms' decisions to ignore technologies that do not address their customers' needs become fatal when two distinct trajectories interact. The first denies the performance demanded over time within a given value network, and the second traces the performance that technologists are able to provide within a given technological paradigm. The trajectory of performance improvement that technology is able to provide may have a distinctly different slope from the trajectory of performance improvement demanded in the system-of-use by downstream customers within any given value network. When the slopes of these two trajectories are similar, we expect the technology to remain relatively contained within its initial value network. But when the slopes differ, new technologies that are initially performance-competitive only within emerging or commercially remote value networks may migrate into other networks, providing a vehicle for innovators in new networks to attack established ones."

"Entrant firms have an attacker's advantage over established firms in those innovations - generally new product architectures involving little new technology per se - that disrupt or redefine the level, rate and direction of progress in an established technological trajectory. This is so because such technologies generate no value within the established network. The only way established firms can lead in commercializing such technologies is to enter the value network in which they create value. As Richard Tedlow noted in his history of retailing in America (in which supermarkets and discount retailing play the role of disruptive technologies), 'the most formidable barrier the established firms faced is that they did not want to do this.'"

Broadcasters have been in this movie before. Whether it was the emergence of FM radio or the not on the radar unaffiliated UHF station that suddenly gained shelf space parity when the advent of CATV carriage killed the need for that goofy second antenna. The established, successful value networks of AM radio and VHF TV worked to create and empower management that came to be genetically blind. Taking the wayback machine to 1965 one could fairly say broadcasters were not willing to trade AM dollars for FM pennies, nor were they interested whatsoever in the trade of VHF dollars for UHF pennies. Other examples are within easy reach. The majority of broadcasters passed on early CATV opportunities, finding the front end much too capital intensive and the notion of folks "paying" for TV to be patently ridiculous. Broadcasters are not alone here. It was not that long ago that my fellow cable MSOs generally agreed that PPV was nothing more than a minor niche play limited to the one-off (the occasional major prize fight), accepted VOD as nothing but pie in the sky, and reasoned that customers having their own dish would forever be limited to unwired rural areas never to be a competitive threat within the MSO's franchised territory.

The emerging player is too often discounted by the incumbent mindset, it was ever thus. Modern media history is replete with "overnight" success stories. New markets and competitive space created out of nothing. Ryan Schreiber the multimedia mogul that reinvented music reviews and crushed the music magazine/fanzine incumbents from the basement of his parents' Minneapolis home. TMZ changing the game in the celebrity gossip food chain, starting as an online brand and moving into syndi-TV. Interesting to note, TMZ was the first to flash the death of Michael Jackson.

Zucker's pennies/dimes argument is nothing new, what it represents is the dilemma, the thesis written about in Christensen's very well done writing. Tom Webster, digerati lead-in-residence at Edison Research, writes about social media being a low cost high reward opportunity, in his words it's a "no-brainer" and he's right. (Life Rewards Action - The Infinite Dial).

The first step in any effective 2009 rehab program for broadcasters is a change in the working vocabulary. From a daily usage of "BUT", the too frequently thrown "OR" to an adoption of and preference for that other more opportunity-laden and richer conjunction "AND"

Mind the counsel of Dr. H.S. Thompson "Buy the ticket, take the ride."

You must choose to play, or not. Wait no longer for the confirmation that comes in the form of diminishing returns. Come to the understanding that money is a trailing variable. Game on.

All that's important is what's coming out of the speakers
and on the screen(s), everything else is a footnote

Bonus: John Furrier is now blogging with contributors at The SiliconANGLE. His title page marked "Computer Science meets Social Science." Bonus 2: Trope is the new Meme.

Random note of interest: Last time the U.S. government requested that broadcast media standby and stand ready to broadcast emergency messages to the public: 1962. Cuban missile crisis. Request made via CONELRAD (Key Station System). Last time the U.S. government requested an online service not go down for scheduled maintenance: 2009. Twitter during the Iran election protests.

2009-07-21T06:58:00.008-05:00

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." R. Buckminster Fuller

"Good ideas have lonely childhoods." Hugh MacLeod

"When we let go and just realize we really don't know everything, new opportunity presents itself." Doug Zanger

Today's image: Take me to your Herder! by jonbradbury. Great shot. Thanks for sharing.

The amazing power of NEW
(and the advantages of abandonment)

The future success of an organization depends upon its embrace of the new and its courage to abandon that which is no longer effective. What new things are getting attention in your shop? What things are you continuing to do that are, for whatever reason, failing to produce the results of the past or the expectations of the present?

The trap, the path to almost certain failure, is to focus the team and resources on getting better. The solution set will most often be found in getting different.

Stop wasting precious time on the numerator. Change the denominator.

The story of Andy Grove and Intel comes to mind. In 1985 Grove famously said to Gordon Moore “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?”..."Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?" (Read more. The Art of Andy Grove via Harvard Business, here)

If you were kicked out and someone was brought in to replace you, what do you think they would do? Why not get to work and do it.

Bravos: It was wonderful to experience another Conclave last week, if only for one day of the latest run. It's truly an exceptional gathering. Year after year it proves to be the little meeting that could. My sense is, again this year, there are four individuals that have - so far - failed to get even close to the credit or recognition they properly deserve. Tom Kay, the Conclave's executive director and keeper of the flame. Jane Dyson, Conclave's MVP, the tie breaking closer that gets things done on the fly no matter the challenge at hand. Joel Denver, the Conclave's patron saint who cares enough to put to work not only his money but the force of his incredible personality and the unmatched ongoing support of his very respected All Access enterprise. Art Vuolo Jr., Radio's Best Friend, the guy who pulls the Clave TV rabbit out of his hat (with a good thirty seconds or so to spare) year after year. He also continues to serve as the video historian of a largely thankless tribe. Kay, Dyson, Denver, Vuolo. There simply ain't no clave'n without these guys . Take a moment this week and give them a call, send them an email, chat them up and say thanks. Since they will not be expecting this to happen, you're certain to make their day a bit brighter. Go ahead, do it. Please and thank you. [FD: In the previous century I served as chair of the Conclave board and recently made application to again serve that institution as a director]

Congrats & cheers: Steven Goldstein, Saga Communications' EVP, on his well deserved 2009 Rockwell Award. Steve is an exceptionally gifted executive. His straight forward style is as refreshing as it is rare. Kudos to longtime Goldstein friend and collaborator Fred Jacobs who did a simply wonderful job introducing Steve at last week's 2009 Conclave awards luncheon.

Good reads: The Demonization of the Contest Pig. The ever insightful Tom Webster of Edison Research weighs in on station gaming, here. Transparency is the new objectivity. Dr Dave Weinberger makes another interesting argument worth your bandwidth, here. Jay's Media Page is the new blog of cool kid, measurement maven and ROI Media Solutions partner Jay Guyther, here. The Three Hardest Words to Say by Doug Zanger A well done writing on developing and leading the hard work of creativity via Ad Age, here.

Summer read: Ripped. How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music by Greg Kot (Amzn info) Highly recommended.

Bonus: Sign up for Hugh MacLeod's Crazy, Deranged Fools Newsletter, here. Thank me later.