"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.

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." Maya Angelou

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." John Lennon

"Never judge a book by its movie." J.W. Eagan

Today's image: Untitled by Mr. Bones. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

Beautiful weekend here in Wisconsin.

BFF Fred Winston has been shooting and uploading some remarkable images and is pairing them with quotations. Great stuff, take a look here. Kudos, Fred.

VOTE: The 2009 SXSW Panel Picker is live here.

Choice: Marketing maven and branding ace Tom Asacker shares writing from the new Phil Fragasso book [Marketing for Rainmakers: 52 Rules of Engagement to Attract and Retain Customers for Life - Amazon info]. Tom promises this to be the first in a series...

"As counterintuitive as it sounds, the surest way to lose customers is to give them too many choices. People are inundated with decision-making responsibilities. Think about your own life. Every single day you’re faced with literally hundreds of personal and professional decisions. Take a walk through your local grocery store and if your choice of cereals, shampoos, sodas, detergents, and breads don’t approach a thousand different options then you’re living in the wrong neighborhood."

Read Tom's entire post here. Thanks for sharing, Tom. Well done! [Hint: All the smart kids have Tom in their reader, highly recommended]

Tom's post reminded me of some long ago discussions. Involved in the turnaround of a major market radio property I complained to friends about the over-crowded competition in the format and the number of stations targeting the same demo.

One of my friends, working in packaged goods (breakfast foods, dry cereal) suggested she would gladly trade places with me. "Having five or ten direct competitors is nothing, try breaking through the clutter when you're up against hundreds of competitors."

Another friend, a writer of business books, agreed, telling me "Compared to the cereal isle in a grocery or the business section of a book store you have very little competition."

Sometime later a friend working at Coke USA said to me "It's not important that they are drinking Coke, what's actually important is why they are not drinking Pepsi."

In that moment my attitude changed forever.

It's like the first time de Bono reached you or when you first grok Mozart, Bronowski, Stanislavski, Tony Schwartz, Locke, Rosser Reeves, Picasso, Ogilvy, Hume, Dusenberry, Drucker, Bucky Fuller, Miro, Isaac Stern or Kasparov.

We achieved great success in that turnaround just mentioned, from last on the ranker to the top, worst to first. The lesson was to change the perspective, the pov, from the small cluster of direct competitors to all possible choices.

We moved from focusing on the numerator to changing the denominator. We stopped thinking about market share and started thinking about market creation.

From the smaller format and demo battles to the much larger share of media behavior and attention war. The result was we gave up getting better and became obsessed with getting different, dramatically different.

Here's a trade secret - once we allowed the users to define us the competition was half-won.

Create contrast.

Differentiate or die.

Get into the behavior - give them reasons

Increase preference - give them reasons to come back

"Be so good they can't ignore you."
Steve Martin

Cartoon by Steve Benson. Outstanding, Steve! Thanks for sharing.

Now reading: The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics - Leonard Susskind. Brilliant! Damn good read. [Amazon info] My sense is Brian Greene and Lisa Randall are better writers, however, Lenny makes his case with a solid and very interesting presentation. Some math included.

Bonus: Phil Hall, radio programming ace and fellow former Okie, tells it like it is...

"It’s time for radio to step-up. We have to focus on the right things again. Listeners take care of advertisers who take care of revenue who take care of shareholders."

Read his entire post here. Bravos, Phil. Well said, as ever.

Thinking out loud: Not certain the POTUS candidates have yet addressed, in depth, telecom, net neutrality, spectrum and other critical communications issues. Emailed both campaigns after reviewing their sites today. Expecting nothing more than an intern or other unpaid staffer to respond. FAIL.

Congrats & cheers: Jeff Jarvis, the buzz machine his own self, scores the gold this morning with Howie on Reliable, to wit:

"Forget for a moment the financial allocation. The journalistic allocation, we over-cover politics and under-cover government. We under-cover life and what really matters to people. We think that politics is life, and it's not."

Bravos, Jeff! You done good. CNN transcript here. Jeff's take here.


My thanks to Michelle Oshen for the tip via FF on the above Cecil Beaton image.

"While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom, the necessity of listening is what makes the right important." Walter Lippmann

"Silence is an answer to a wise man." Euripides

"The attempt and not the deed confounds us." Shakespeare

Today's image: Peaceful Reflections by ballycroy. Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Fine line drawn by Dave Winer..."FriendFeed is to Twitter as WordPress is to Blogger" [via Twitter]

Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO: "The dead-end suggestion box and the auto-reply are symbols of corporate indifference and are no longer tolerated." Jeff Jarvis shares that remark and goes on to write "But the real question for companies and institutions is how willing they are to let their constituents into the process of doing their jobs. Can customers help design products? Can citizens write legislation? Can readers suggest stories newspapers should cover? Your constituents are already talking about you and joining a conversation with them is a fine first step. But are you willing to let them sit at the next desk to work with you? Will you be that open?" Read Jeff's entire article via The Guardian here. Kudos, Jeff. Jeff is also blogging on the FCC here.

Getting Schooled: Bravos to Entercom. They're creating truly unique experiences for aspiring musicians and music fans - encounters with their favorite artists. They've signed retailer Guitar Center as sponsor. They've created web assets to support the initiative [Get Schooled with Guitar Center], listeners qualify to participate via radio station websites. A very cool concept and well done. Creating memorable experiences, real dream come true moments, is powerful magic. My suggestion is this may represent an excellent opportunity for MasterCard sponsorship, what Entercom is creating are moments that one can not purchase, they are indeed "priceless." My thanks to Emily DiTomo for the tip.

Culture of the tribe: Jay Rosen has written an important piece on the brave new world of semi-pro journalism [Open Systems, Closed Systems and Trauma in the Press].

Can you hear me now? Might want to check your website as a listener or viewer would in attempting to contact you. Broadcast site after broadcast site feature Contact Us pages filled with email addresses, however, very few provide the primary telephone number. Getting in touch with station based colleagues and not having their direct dials often means visiting their website. More often than not one finds numbers for the studio, the newsroom, the sales department but no mention of the main number. Thinking my best bet is the sales dept I often call that number, usually get voicemail and typically become captive to the automated attendant. Provide the main number, answer your phone. My sense is there's competitive advantage here as no one is doing this.

Congrats & cheers: Patrick Goldstein adding a blog, The Big Picture, to his weekly LA Times column on media, entertainment and pop culture. Bonneville, Chicago on their trend, two stations in the top ten, 25-54 (WTMX & WDRV). CBS' Norm Winer on again posting a top ten money demo showing for WXRT.

"Obviousness is always the enemy to correctness." Bertrand Russell

"The most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidences." John Allen Paulos

"The art of prophecy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future." Mark Twain

Today's image: Dancing with clouds by Beat. Wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

New NewsGang Live: The latest podcast w/ Steve Gillmore and Doc Searls featuring NPR iCEO Dennis Haarsager and Stephen Hill from Hearts of Space. Listen in here (MP3). 80 minutes.

First tribe of wireless gets the order: Yahoo! turns to radio ads to lure Google Web searchers. CNET's Elinor Mills has the story here.

Congrats & cheers: Jeff Jarvis signs a book deal. Microsoft to debut Blews, an aggregation of political blogs.

"Painting changes space into time; music time into space." Hugo von Hofmannsthal

"Art produces ugly things that frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things that always become ugly with time." Jean Cocteau

"Art is the cult of error." Francis Picabia

Today's image: Gokce by rimedhitaf. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

Interesting stuff learned on the way to other learning. Crossword puzzles were first published in 1913 by the World, a Pulitzer paper in New York city. Crosswords became all the rage in the late teens and widely adopted in the popular culture of the 1920s. Timesmen looked down on the crossword as a "game" not worthy of space in the news hole. The first Times crossword finally debuted in 1942. There's a lesson in adoption here. Further, another exhibit in the case against so-called first mover advantage, the canard "first in wins" (the finest examples remain Hydrox v Oreo and Yahoo v Google). You heard it here last - incumbency is practically irrelevant.

400 year death spiral continues: Who won the National Headliner Awards for Online Videography? The winners were all dead tree guys. Michael Gay has details via LR here.

Being afraid (denial at end-stage): Newsweek embraces the flawed arguments of Andrew Keen and claims experts are "in" while amateurs are "out" (Revenge of the Experts). Howard Owen opines here, Terry Heaton's take here. Kudos to Howard and Terry!

The NPR shakeup: Dennis Haarsager breaks it down here. Bravos, Dennis! Good luck. Related - Trouble for NPR by Jeff Jarvis w/comments here.

Bonus: Brooke Gladstone interviews Clay Shirky via OTM here. Thanks, Brooke! The gap between "thought and action" has become a click.

Congrats & cheers: Branding and marketing ace Michael Fischer has started blogging here. Jeff Jarvis for pointing out the obvious during his conversation with Howie on Reliable yesterday. Jeff said the POTUS race is really all about the "job interview." Amid all of the inside baseball about the campaigns kudos to Jeff on some needed perspective. Ken Stern leaving NPR in better shape than he first found it (stay tuned, his finest hour is yet to come). Bobby Rich, my favorite rich guy and radio legend, gets well deserved recognition via Erica Farber's Publishers Profile here.

Spanish red: Garnacha de Fuego. Old Vines 2006. 100% Garnacha. A very good value at $10.

“The best way I made things happen was by saying I could and then it forced me to do it. It’s one thing to keep it to yourself but if you say it to everybody, then you have no choice. It was either that or get out of the business. When you put yourself out on a limb- there’s no choice but to win.”

“If you have the confidence in yourself that you can pull off anything and if you leave yourself flexible enough to bob and weave where you have to... the goal stays the same... How you’re going to get there may change but “Here’s where the journeys gonna end”- How we’ll get there we’ll have to figure out along the way.”

"Everything in life is sales."

Lee Arnold

Today's image: Bare Trees by Fred Winston. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

Today's quotations, all by rock radio raconteur Lee Arnold, are from a new writing. The true story of how one gifted radio program director and his staff, with nothing more than a great idea and their own relentless passion, made national news and history bringing The Who to their town. Sex, drugs, and a generous helping of wireless swagger, that radio surname magic one should properly call only by its given name, rock and roll...

WHOoPLA: The Greatest Rock Radio Stunt Ever by V. Scott Beddome. Highly recommended here. Closed circuit to Beddome: When casting for the big screen accept no other player than Johnny Depp to play the role of rogue warrior Arnold. (FD: In the previous century I served as valet, defense attorney and part-time concierge to the great Mr Arnold)

Bonus: Do you own a rock radio station? If you manage a rock station, should you be in charge of programming, sales or promotion for a rock station, consult or sell anything whatsoever to a rock station (or have need to arrest the attention of the rock radio audience), you'll benefit from getting Lee Arnold involved. This is not to suggest he will be available. Please, don't blame me if he ain't interested. It is only my best counsel for how to end 2008 much better off than you are ending this year, no matter how well you think you're doing. Rock on and good luck. You may find Lee here.

Bonus videos: Seth, Dr Dave and ten other thinkers share their video picks. Well worth the time, check them out here. Kudos to the gang at Twist Image!


Ex-dead tree guy gets it: Bravos to Jeff Jarvis for making the obvious, obvious...

"A newspaper (or, for that matter, TV or radio) company needs to set up a new, hyperlocal company that is designed to go after those 1,000 $100 ads. Let the big, old newspaper and online divisions keep serving and saving those big advertisers. Start a new company that makes small, local advertising its sole focus. That means they need to set up automated systems to accept and place highly targeted local ads and directories. That means they need to come up with new means of selling without on-the-street sales staffs: outbound phone sales, direct response, even local sales network (instead of citizen journalists, citizen sales people), making aggressive use of the promotional power of the newspaper while you still have it. That means they need to have lots of targeted local content without large editorial staffs. That means they need to set up networks with local bloggers and others and they need to encourage more people to join and the way they will do that is by sharing revenue and so these need to be both content and ad networks. This is unproven but I know that this won’t happen in the existing structure from print or even online staffs. It’s hard and its new but — as the Journal now well proves — if you newspapers don’t do it, your online competitors will."

Read Jeff's entire post with comments here.

"In your journey toward the realization of personal goals, don't make choices based only on your security and your safety. Nothing is safe. It is not safe to challenge the status quo. But challenge it you must." Toni Morrison

"Like every generation, we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality." John F. Kennedy

"Be bold, be bold, be bold." Susan Sontag

One of the cool things about living in Wisconsin is the rich experience of seasonal change. Each year as fall approaches change is set into motion and the big show begins. Last evening we heard the honking and watched the V-formations of Canada geese arriving from Hudson Bay. Soon the migratory flyway overhead will be stocked with waterfowl. The photo above is of Horicon Marsh a wetland habitat. Marlin Perkins comes to mind as I write this post opening. As we provide a safe habitat for wild birds so must managers provide protection for their teams.

Scott Berkun makes this point in his new book The Myths of Innovation (Amazon info)...

"One thing a genius can't do that his manager can is provide cover fire. Whether through power, inspiration, or charisma, managers have the singular burden of protecting their teams. Innovations always threaten someone in power, and executives in search of budget cuts frequently target them first. The manager's unique role is to use whatever means necessary to shield innovation while it's too young to defend itself in the open. Steve Jobs took the Macintosh project into a separate building at Apple headquarters, sequestering it from the rest of the company. The first laptop at Toshiba was rejected by corporate leaders, and Tetsuya Mizoguchi, the team leader, fought to keep the project alive until he won executive support; three years later, the project had 38% of the market. Any story of breakthrough work has someone acting as a shield, defending innovation while it's happening...Managers can take larger bullets for the team than anyone else."

The effective manager provides protection

There has never been a more exciting time to be working in ad supported measured media. The sea change taking place is not the stuff of evolution but rather disruptive game-changing revolution. This time of incredible opportunity demands effective leadership and the effective manager must provide protection. As the Toni Morrison quote above says "It is not safe to challenge the status quo. But challenge it you must."

The dead tree guys are holding a clinic on this sea change. Here is part of a writing by Jeff Jarvis on Newspapers in 2020...

"So by 2020, I predict, the surviving news organizations will be built on large and efficient advertising networks. They will place advertising not only on the content they create but, in far greater volume, on the content others create. This means they need to encourage others to create more quality content. That, I argue, is the key strategic challenge for newspapers: how to gather more and produce less, how to enable others to produce more content so we can build a larger network around them. This reduces our cost while increasing content for our communities. It also reduces our cost while increasing our potential for revenue.

So we become networks of content and content creators. By 2020, most news coverage will not be created by people employed by our organizations. Much of it will still be created by professionals, by people making a living off journalism. But many of those will be independent. All over the world, I see journalists laid off from their jobs who start their own independent news ventures, and many are starting to make an economic go of it. I also see newcomers creating their own enterprises."

Jeff also says...

"So how do we make sufficient revenue in the future? I argue that we need to operate advertising networks, finding and selling the best of what exists both within and without of our walls and sites. And if we do that quickly, we have a few timely advantages: First, we have the relationships with and the trust of advertisers; if we assemble the best networks, we are well-positioned to sell them. Second, advertisers have been even more timid about this new age than we have, and so we can be their guides. If we do not do this, be assured that Google will."

Read Jeff's entire essay here. Bravos Jeff! If not Google, then certainly Microsoft or a player to be named later. Agree with Jeff on one other very important issue, the importance of incumbency...

"Who is best to get us there? No rule says that it will be the incumbents: today’s newspapers. If these products, brands, and companies are to survive and prosper in 13 years, they must aggressively innovate today, leading – not following – their readers and advertisers into the new universe, reimagining and revinventing their service – and journalism itself – to exploit this new architecture of media and news. Their advantage born of their control over content and distribution will become increasingly meaningless. Their businesses are losing value as circulation and advertising decline. Their brands are losing equity as trust declines (a recent Pew survey said 53 percent of Americans think news stories are often inaccurate). New competitors have the advantage of operating more nimbly, without the burden of infrastructure and with a keener understanding of – and no fear of – the new opportunities technology affords."

Jeff is spot-on here. My sense is incumbency, as a practical matter, is meaningless in everything except political campaigns. Being an incumbent no more secures success than does being the first mover. Both are canards. Both dangerous notions past their best-used by dates.

Back to the manager as protector. At one time the sales department provided cover for product innovation. All of my greatest successes in delivering numbers to the sales department were made possible only by the creative collaboration with and full support of sales. A great sales manager buys time for product and audience development. It was Lee Simonson, Drew Horowitz, Bill Hartman, Chuck Tweedle and other exceptional leaders that played critically important roles in my ratings successes - they bought priceless time for me and my team.

It was a crisis of confidence in the sales department and a massive failure of imagination that brought down WCBS-FM in 2005, that killed the 19 year-old Oasis franchise in Dallas, and it's that deadly combo which continues to kill off good stations. Nothing can do more harm to innovation than a sales department that's not producing. Nothing builds the brand like time; the support of a productive sales team is key to the ongoing success of every great station.

Perhaps the most improper deployment of a productive sales team is keeping a bad station alive. We all know of stations that are not able to break a two share yet are allowed to continue posting mediocre ratings because a good sales department has the station on life support; the numbers are modest but additive to the cluster, it's the station that brings in the buy. We see this too often. It is the responsibility of leadership to produce results. It is the responsibility of leadership to bring out the best in others and to achieve the full potential of the assets under their management. A perfectly good full-powered station should never be allowed to deliver mediocre ratings (or sales) performance without getting the serious attention needed to correct the situation. Hard working sellers deserve a credible product in advance of competitive numbers. Give them a story. Make something happen that they can hear (or see) and believe in.

If there is one thing too often missing in today's broadcast enterprise it is the productive creative tension between programming and sales. To take advantage of today's many opportunities, to make the best of the revolution at hand, to navigate one of the greatest sea changes in ad supported measured media we need great sales managers. Nothing less will get the job done. Nothing.

Programming ace Tom Teuber reminded me of something I had said in one of our earlier conversations. The role of program director as sometime defense attorney. Here again, we are talking about the effective manager as protector. It's one of those additional duties as assigned and it's very important. Talent need protection. Providing the right environment for creative people to do their best work is certainly critical, however, standing up and being their advocate is equally important. Over our recent lunch in Chicago Tom quoted Gordon McLendon "Get people to talk about your radio station." Very wise counsel. Long, long before it became vogue to hold forth on the power of word of mouth, viral marketing, et al, Gordon was making it by the truck load and to incredible affect. To get folks talking you need to do something. One needs to go off the rez and take a calculated creative gamble. This involves a measure of risk as does any successful creative endeavor. Talent will perform at their potential only when they feel they have an advocate to champion their work. Great performances come from talent being focused on performing rather than being preoccupied with consequences. Talent need to know they can run the yellow lights.

Bonus: Build A Sales Machine

Bonus 2: The legendary Paul Drew, Jaywalking with Leno. Outstanding PD! Congrats & cheers!