When is a link not a link?

A big question these days is about press release-pick up.

There are lots of spam sites that pick up parts of press releases in the hopes that web surfers (do people still use that term) who land on the page may decide to click onto one of the ads on the side of the page. If even is a small percentage of people landing on the page click on an ad, the site pays for itself.

But from a client and agency perspective, these sites are meaningless. I've discussed this before, but those sites draw random people, not potential customers for our B2B clients.

On the other hand, there are media sites that regularly pick up press releases. Media sites that range from smaller TV stations around the country to publications like Forbes. Recently, we distributed two press releases over PR Newswire for the same client; the report we got back included pickup on the Forbes site. The client was thrilled, as we've seen with other clients.

But we decided to investigate further. Going to the Forbes.com site, we entered the client's name in the search box....

The result: nothing.

No link to the client's press release, even though we had a Forbes.com URL that showed the release. In other words, the pick-up existed outside Forbes.com's search engine, and could be located only by clicking on the link provided by PR Newswire.

We are now advising clients not to get too impressed by the Forbes.com pickup of the release. Not to pick on PR Newswire or Forbes.com, I'd bet the same is true for BusinessWire, too.

One measure of a successful press release is the number of stories generated by them. But these days of smaller editorial staffs, just getting a press release picked up on relevant, meaningful, non-spam sites can be a measure of success.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean the press release has real impact.

Bottom-line: The industry needs a better way to measure the impact of a press release.

More about Magazines

The New York Times ran an interesting interview with George Green, the chief executive of Hearst Magazines International, which sells foreign versions of Cosmopolitan, Esquire and other Hearst publications. In the interview, Green says, "The economics are hugely different (inside the U.S. and outside). The United States is the only place where the postal service gives incentives for mailing magazines. So here, about 90 percent of magazines are sold by subscription, only 10 percent on newsstands. Outside the United States, that’s reversed. And no one overseas expects a huge discount from the cover price when they do subscribe. The business is driven entirely by ad revenue here, but elsewhere it is driven by circulation as well as ads."

In other countries, magazines are sold at newsstands, which affects the way Hearst designs its magazines and how it sells advertising in them.

According to Green, they use much heavier paper. "Since we don’t mail many magazines, we don’t have to worry about postal weight, and the heavier paper gives a higher-quality look on the newsstand. You hardly ever see newsstands in the United States anymore, but overseas you see them everywhere. The concept of a rate base — promising advertisers a certain level of readers — doesn’t exist in other countries. So you don’t have to spend a lot of money on promoting your new magazine to lots of readers. It can take more than three years for a new magazine to break even in the United States. Overseas, you can make money with your second issue"

One interesting concept of reselling/republishing U.S. magazines, content, and format to readers in other countries. Hearst doesn't just translate U.S. content into the local language. "We make the American content available, but it’s up to our partners whether to use it or not. At first they use lots of it, but over time it goes down to about 20 percent. After all, the women of Australia are not like the women of Korea, who are not like the women of France," Green said.

From a global messaging perspective, what's also interesting is that Hearst does not offer package deals, offering space in five countries for the price of four.

"We rarely bundle," Green said. "Media buyers tend to operate locally, with localized budgets. It’s rare that someone in Korea is buying ad space in Latvia."

That's important because often U.S. advertising and PR clients think it should take one budget to cover Europe. There are some pan-European publications -- the International Herald Tribune (which caters to Americans), The Economist, The Financial Times and The Wall St. Journal Europe are the main English-language exceptions. But generally, "covering" Europe requires translating messages into the local language and culture, and having people on the ground in each country. That often requires separate budgets for each country and plans customized for each country.

The full interview is available here.

Magazine Death Pool

Business Week's media critic, Jon Fine, wrote about MagazineDeathPool.com, a blog that seeks to predict which magazines will fail and when. The blogger, apparently a magazine publishing insider, does a good job of explaining what turns out to be an epidemic of closings of major magazines. The latest victim: Business 2.0, which it first predicted in Feb. 2006: www.magazinedeathpool.com/magazine_death_pool/business/index.html.

It's not surprising that the Internet is putting pressure on print magazines. (I've already discussed that in earlier posts.) Apparently Time Inc. feels the smart business decision is to close a well-received magazine like Business 2.0, despite a strong circulation. MagazineDeathPool notes that Business 2.0 is "the forgotten business magazine of the Time Inc. empire" which also publishes Fortune, Fortune Small Business (FSB) and Money, and that is "in the same category as another barely-breathing dot-com relic, Fast Company."

What's surprising, though, is this: Time Inc. feels that they can't sell the advertising to support Business 2.0. Remember: circulation for most general magazines is only one sign of a magazine's health -- but it is not the most important. Advertising underwrites subscription fees for most magazines; publishers often reduce subscription fees to boost circulation and in turn to raise fess they can charge advertisers.

Having a strong circulation, which an involved readership, is not enough reason to keep a magazine around.

There's an increase in magazine's death rate because -- and this isn't getting a lot of coverage yet -- advertising is going through a slump. In the tech press, some ad reps blame industry consolidation: too many mergers reduce the number of companies that need to advertise.

From a PR perspective, this is bad news because:
1. Fewer magazines means fewer opportunities for coverage.
2. Fifty percent of any issue of a healthy magazine is advertising copy. Any cut in ad pages = cut in editorial copy -- again reduced opportunities for coverage.
3. Fewer opportunities leads to increased competition for remaining editorial.

Of course, this is not the first wave of magazine closings -- there were a lot following the dot-com crash, and in the early 1990s and in 1987, too. While PR will survive as it embraces new channels (and re-evaluates its priorities of traditional print to online), the challenge for the magazine industry is more significant. To capture readership, particularly those younger than Baby Boomers, magazines will need to find new ways of being relevant...and that may mean moving to a completely non-paper basis.

Somethng in the water...

There must be something in the water. Fast Company's July/August issue, featuring enviro-spokesmodel Al Gore on its cover, also features an article about bottled water that reports that bottled water is wasteful -- just in terms of the all the plastic bottles produced to hold the water.

On Aug. 12, New York Times published "Water, Water Everywhere, but Guilt by the Bottleful" (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/fashion/12water.html?_r=1&oref=slogin).

Maybe it's a summer trend -- hot days and not much news -- but there's been a spike in news about bottled water.

I've seen articles about Coca-Cola acknowledged that its Dasani brand is made from tap water. That Pepsi's Aquafina brand will be labeled tap water.

The first article I saw was in March, but there seems to be a rising tide (sorry) of criticism against the bottled water industry. There's even an article, from physorg.com, that's gotten significant picked up around the world. It's headline: "The New Public Enemy Number 1: Bottled Water."

I could use a drink.

Yet more about Wikipedia...

I'm not obsessed with Wikipedia -- it may only seem that way. The same could be said the New York Times, which ran two articles recently about Wikipedia.

The New York Times had an interesting article, "Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits," makes the point that Wikipedia does not like corporate meddling on sites, and that it is now easier to find out who has edited those entries thanks to "wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network."

Interestingly, the article found "most of the corporate revisions did not stay posted for long. Many Wikipedia entries are in a constant state of flux as they are edited and re-edited, and the site’s many regular volunteers and administrators tend to keep an eye out for bias."

The second article, "Defending Wikipedia's Impolite Side," provides an interesting look Wikipedia's perspective on "being punk'd" online. The bottom line: Wikipedia isn't doing much to correct possible defamation in entries.

More advice on Wikipedia

Here's some more advice on Wikipedia:

6. Sometimes dis-contributors (see earlier posting) will delete entries from Wikipedia newbies just because they have no track record. The best way to overcome this objection is to build a track record. And the best way to build a track record is to edit pre-existing entries. The secret to that is simple: There are truly lots of misspellings and grammatical errors throughout Wikipedia -- so it is not difficult to contribute to an entry without having to have factual expertise on a topic. Just click onto "Edit This Page," and, just like MS Word, Wikipedia software uses a red underline to identify misspelled words. Once you correct them, the page goes into "Your Contributions" page. Of the more than two dozen entries, just six are new material. The rest were copy-editing changes. Which, believe me, Wikipedia desperately needs.

7. The secret to working successfully with Wikipedia and other social networks is frustratingly simple: you need to make the investment of time. Time to check out the site and learn the ground rules. Time to contribute ...by following those ground rules. And time to make sure your contributions remain, and don't get edited out by dis-contributors. Clients who want a quick turn-around and quick results are going to be disappointed because it takes time to be seen as a useful member of these online communities. If you rush into things, you'll make mistakes, and could inadvertently harm your client or cause.

8. Many contributors to Wikipedia seem to be lazy. By leaving the Wikipedia world, and doing a little searching on the Internet, I've been able to find credible sources for correct misinformation. Again, if the dis-contributors did a little digging and more copy-editing, they could actually make a real contribution to the Wikipedia world.

9. Lee Gomes, a Wall St. Journal reporter and "Portals" columnist, makes an interesting point in his recent column, "Forget the Articles, Best Wikipedia Read Is Its Discussions." Discussion pages are "where Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or shouldn't be." Gomes discusses issues raised on the Ireland entry (should the entry be called "The Republic of Ireland"?) or the page for kittens (an "editor was objecting to the statement that most people think kittens are cute"). While I understand discussions about subjective perspectives, some discussions about facts get heated, but could be readily solved by further research. For example, there was a debate on the discussion page for Joan Didion surrounding the term "prose stylist." The term was deleted from her entry by someone who felt that all writers could be classified as "prose stylists." (That is not the case with many Wikipedia entries, in my opinion.) Others stated that "prose stylist" is a valid description of Didion. This debate started April 2005 and continued through Aug. 2007. Part of the problem was getting a citation to back up the description of Didion as a prose stylist. I did a quick Google search, and found a reliable citation from the New York Times. Problem solved. That's an example of Wikipedians being too lazy to find information outside the Wikipedia world.

10. There's a lot of movie and entertainment information on Wikipedia, and I found that many of the articles include citations from Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com). So that in some cases, the Wikipedia entry doesn't offer as much trivia or interesting dialog lines as IMDB. While IMDB does have user-generated content, it could do a whole lot more by letting its users know to add content there, and for making it easier to post content onto the IMDB site. I've added information to IMDB before, but it took several days before the information appeared -- which is a benefit of Wikipedia: you can see your information instantly.

Washington Post & Hard Times

In "Hard News: Newspapers are dying. At the Washington Post Co., CEO Donald Graham is banking on the Internet to save serious journalism," Fortune's Marc Gunther takes a very interesting look at the need for old media to adapt.

Citing the Post as his "'$0.35 edition' in his blog," a Post reporter is lauded for being "platform-agnostic, which is a nice way of saying that his bosses are no longer big believers in print. Today a small army of bloggers, podcasters, chatroom hosts, radio voices, and TV talking heads, as well as a few old-fashioned ink-stained wretches, populates the newsroom at the 131-year-old Post. "If circulation is dropping," the Post reporter said, "and we're trying to figure out how people are going to get their news, who am I to say no to trying out new avenues?"

One of the secrets of the Post, according to an editor there, "Investigative reporting is our brand."

According to Fortune, "The Post has two goals online. It wants to become a must-buy in Washington while increasing its share of national ad dollars. Right now ads aimed at local readers account for about 60 percent of revenues. The site offers a vast trove of local content - going-out guides, traffic, weather, sports. Says Graham: 'We have a map of D.C. with every school listed, with test scores and other things parents would want to know. It's not all-inclusive, but it's a lot of information, and you couldn't do that in the paper.'"

The implications for those of us in PR is that we need to make sure our information is platform-agnostic, and look to use the Internet in ways that go well beyond the paper-based press release. It is likely to cost more to produce, certainly at first, but be much for effective.