Wired Validates 5 of Our Trends

We're already seeing validation of some of our trends. The January issue of Wired ran two articles of note to our trends: cutting the cord and the gig economy.

About cord cutting, we said, "We expect some people not to cut the cord because it’s more complicated and not necessarily cheaper if you cut the cable cord." In an article called "Cord-Cutting Is Gonna Suck in 2016, But It'll Get Better," Wired identified the same problem we did: the cost of different subscriptions services, the complications of how to access it including of when you exceed your data limit means that cord-cutting isn't the solution you think it.

We also said the gig economy will generate coverage in 2016, and that "To pessimists, it means that people won’t have the safety net of company-provided healthcare and benefits." Also in the January issue (and not yet available online), is an article by Jessi Hempel called, "A New Deal: Gig-Economy Workers Need Protection. Now." Check out the article when it becomes online.

Actually, in his Letter from the Editor, Scott Dadich identified other trends that validated ours. Dadich feels that VR will go mainstream in 2016 while we think VR will still be much more of an early adopter tech next year. 

We agree with him (or he with us) that "AI comes to the everyday" (we said, "The rise of AI"). We both offered up concerns about unicorns, mostly that startups worth upwards of $1B will become on the verge of extinction -- okay, that's overstating things; it's just going to be much more difficult for them in 2016. 

And in "Autonomous driving gets serious," Dadich agrees with us that "we won't be handing over the steering wheel this year," and that a big issue is "talking about regulations" -- while we said the big issue isn't the tech or safety issues but "the insurance requirements."

So, judging by Wired, we're doing pretty well with our predictions.

Also, check out Fast Company's "Twenty Predictions for the Next 20 Years," by Robert Sarfian, which has a lot of interesting good trends.

Meanwhile, by the way, we expect a lot of IoT news coming from CES next week.

Here's to a happy New Year, and more tech validations.

Fast Company Validates "Made in the USA" Trend

Back in March, we predicted that an ongoing story would be "Made in the USA":

Made in the USA: bringing back manufacturing jobs to the US. As costs in India, China, Russia and Brazil increase, expect that the benefits out offshore outsourcing may decline enough to make it more attractive to bring some manufacturing back home. Look for stories about small manufacturers whose business is growing as a result.

The July/August issue of Fast Company featured a compelling story, "The Road To Resilience: How Unscientific Innovation Saved Marlin Steel;A little maker of metal baskets shows how U.S. manufacturers can thrive against all comers." It's a fascinating look at a company that manufactured bagel display wire baskets turned itself into a high performance wire basket company that supplies Boeing, Toyota, and other customers with stringent needs.

 There have been other articles about manufacturing coming back to the U.S.; let us know if there are others you thought were as compelling.

Fast Company Cover Story on How to Unlug Validates Our Prediction from 2012

Back in 2012, we said:

The desire to be connected 24/7 may change in 2012. You almost never have downtime anymore, and people are beginning to notice that’s not all good.  Sure, if you are waiting in line at the post office or bank (something today’s kindergarteners won’t do by the time they hit college), you’ll be able to check email, play an app, text your friend, or make a call. But this lack of downtime may negatively impact our ability to concentrate and avoid distractions at work and at home. The recognition that we actually need to disconnect, that we need downtime, is likely to generate coverage this year. Already a handful of companies have limited email, both during the day and after hours – and we think more will join those ranks. We also think the concept of going on vacation without access to email or cell will become more of a status symbol because it now takes a lot of money to disconnect yourself from your regular workday.

The current Fast Company cover story validates our prediction: #Unplug: Baratunde Thurston Left The Internet For 25 Days, And You Should, Too; I have left the Internet. I’m on vacation. That means no social media updates, responses, check-ins, likes, taps, pokes, noogies, tickles, or head locks. I’m going to practice looking people in the eye and not checking my email or . . .

Check it out -- there are some good tips for unplugging/disconnecting.

Guess we were ahead of the curve on that one!

Let us know if you have unplugged (clearly that would be after the unplugged experience.)

The Lessons of Innovation from Fast Company

Every company is looking to be innovative -- and every business magazine offers insights about innovation.

A recent Fast Company offered lessons of innovations, and made some worthwhile points. I've identified a few important lessons (below) but check out the entire article:

• Growth should be a tactic, not a strategy. In other words, growth shouldn't be the end goal by itself, but a means to achieve a more significant, sustainable goal.
•  Design is a competitive advantage. Not enough companies look at design this way -- but more should.
•  Social media makes products and services better. This is a way to look at social media that B2B companies often don't understand.

Check out the other lessons, too, here.

2011 Trends Report Card, Part III

Here's the final part of our report card:

• The rules for social media will continue to evolve -- rapidly. Our point: Companies are still learning how to navigate social media, which gives newbies the opportunity to jump in, and to learn from what others are doing well as well as from mistakes others have made. One challenge remains: staying ahead of the range of sites, which can rise and fall in popularity...like the once dominant Friendster. Google-Plus launched in 2011 after some high profile social media failures on Google's part, but which generated 65 million users in a few months. So Google-Plus has quickly become a site that businesses should consider as part of their social media strategy. It's not to late to sign up, but it does mean another site to pay attention to, in addition to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
• There weren't media stories directly about this but in 2011, companies were judged by how quickly they respond to social media situations.  For example, when Kenneth Cole posted an offensive tweet about protests in Cairo during the Arab Spring, it took him six hours to respond to criticisms.  The story became focused on the amount of time it took Cole to respond. Overall: A.
• We said the press release would not die in 2011, and we feel that it didn't, even as some companies used Twitter to issue news.  We feel that the press release will continue to be relevant in 2012.
• Traditional media did move to a stable, if fragile, footing in 2011, as we predicted. 
• While there were more apps designed to allow viewers to interact with other viewers while watching TV, these apps are more for avid fans and did not exactly become common. Perhaps that's because it's an uncomfortable combination of lean-back activities like watching TV and lean-forward activities like using a computer. (Expect to hear a lot of people talk about lean-back/lean-forward activities in 2012.) We overstated this one. Grade: B-.
•  Hybrid, mashup and curation were used a lot in 2011, but they were not the most overused words. According to Lake Superior State University, the list of most overused words include: Amazing, Occupy, baby bump and man cave. I really dislike the last two. Grade: B.
• We were right about some of the top stories -- the economy, health care, politics, and the battle among Google vs. Apple, etc. (Check out an excellent Fast Company cover story that further validates this prediction: The Great Tech War Of 2012: Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon battle for the future of the innovation economy.)  We were wrong about 3D TVs -- not much media interest when there did not seem to be much consumer interest in the technology.Oprah's network, OWN, got some coverage, but was not a major story -- just as it did not turn into a major cable network. Yet. (Don't bet against Oprah.) Overall grade: B+.

We'll publish more of our annual predictions tomorrow. In the meantime, you can check out all our 2011 predictions here: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV and Part V.

The Need to Expand Beyond Traditional Channels

The current Fast Company's special design theme offers up some interesting articles. Its article about the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum ("Mister Moggridge Has Mad Ambition") raises some interesting questions about the broad field of design.

What I also find interesting was a quote about the nature of museums, from Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian's undersecretary for history, art, and culture -- and someone who understands how museums work:

"Museums originally were founded as 19th-century institutions. Well, now we exist in a different kind of world. A hundred-thousand people came to an exhibit? Well, a hundred-thousand people watching a TV program is very little. A hundred-thousand people watching a YouTube video is puny! And so I think the idea is, How do we take the stuff of the museum, the visceral experience of the object, and somehow translate that to other forms of media? We haven't figured that out yet."

That's a challenge all communications functions need to solve in their own way: how to take an organization's traditional content and push it out to make it more accessible by the people who can't visit your corporate equivalent of a museum gallery.

Redesigning Workplace

Thanks to technology, the workplace has changed dramatically. A decade ago, you probably carried a huge brick of a cellphone and a heavy laptop. Today, you probably carry some combination of a smartphone, an MP3 player, a tablet and a laptop -- and all the accessories and chargers. While that may seem like a lot of devices to lug around, the fact is that they free us up to work and play anytime, anywhere.

One of the technologies that interests me most -- videoconferencing -- was a solution 10 years ago that only big businesses could have afforded, with room systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Today, smartphones and tablets now offer video chat capabilities.

As people become accustomed to videoconferencing at work, businesses need to redesign cubicles to enhance videoconference experience for those on the other side of the videoconference. For people who work next to a window, outside glare can cause people to squint, for example. Or, because of current office lighting, people may appear to be either lurking in the shadows or checking in from a desert. In the Aug. issue, Fast Company ran an illustration of an updated cubicle (Redesigning: Cubicles). Some of it was tongue-in-cheek, like Dilbert creator Doug Adams' suggestion of "adding a foldout seat [that as] soon as it's down, 'a timer starts that makes your phone ring after a few minutes, so you can excuse an unwelcome guest."

But at least one suggestion makes a lot of sense: "Webcam lighting: To streamline digital meetings, [a} switch instantly adjusts cubicle lighting to offset the brightness of the computer screen."

That makes a lot of sense to us. Check out Redesigning: Cubicles for other tips.

Adopting our workplace for how we work today

On paper (for whoever still uses paper), it might seem unlikely that a Duke University English professor is a driving voice in how to approach and address the "bewildering pace of technological change."

But Cathy Davidson is interested in more than essays and punctuation.  As profiled in last month's Fast Company, Davidson is the "cofounder of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), an international network of academics inspired by new technology, which administers the annual Digital Media and Learning competition with the MacArthur Foundation. Davidson believes that true conceptual innovation is needed to reinvent our homes, schools, and workplaces for the demands of the digital age. She calls her approach 'technopragmatism,' or 'technorealism.'"

As Beloit College's annual Mindset List points out, this year's freshman class barely remembers dial-up Internet access. Davidson says, "We're at the perfect moment to begin reimagining our institutions and developing practices to deal with the onslaught of information, the reality of constant connectedness, and the challenges of global collaboration."

The way we collaborate has evolved significantly from the "Mad Men" era. And it continues to evolve quickly. Offices and the nature of the workplace need to evolve to enable people to collaborate effectively wherever they are. Especially, as Davidson points out in her new book, "Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn," distraction is a significant factor in our 9-to-whatever days. Also check out the Fast Company article, Duke's Cathy Davidson Is Fixing The Future Of Distraction.

Fast Company & 8 Tips on the Future of Marketing

Ok, so this is not going to be a Valentine's Day post.

The current issue of Fast Company features a compelling article, "The Future of Advertising" by Danielle Sacks that raises some key points for all marketing-related agencies, including PR:

• Marketing can't just be entertaining. It must be useful.
• Marketing can no longer be just glossy concepts perfected before going to the client to approve.
• Digital is incremental, experimental, continually optimized, in perpetual beta.
• Digital will change how you make money, staff projects, price things.
• Digital isn't just one channel -- it's a medium that blooms thousands of other mediums, leading to fragmented audiences via fragmented access points (search, geotagging, iPad, mobile apps, and social networks.
• While there has never been more to reach consumers, it's never been more ways to connect.
• Creating more work for less money -- which means that agencies of all sorts are paying the know ho of being in an industry that doesn't know to protect its own interests, according to Jean Marie Dru, Chair of TBWA.
• The rules will keep changing.
  

Sacks cites an article Dru wrote in Advertising Age, "Endless Pressure on Price Traps Agencies, Clients in Death Spiral," which is also worth reading.

What will the future of marketing be in 2011? It's clear that marketing will continue to evolve, and quickly. We think it's clear that companies can no longer sit on the sidelines of social media as a fad. For more of what we think, check back soon for our annual list of trends.

Old Media Habits Die Hard as Wired, Fast Company Feature Look at the New Fall TV Season

There are some outliers who think we live in a post-TV world, but I think they're wrong. As a cost-savings tip, there have been plenty of articles over the past two years reporting that you can cut your expensive cable or satellite bill and still watch the programs you want...on your computer, for free.

Many of those articles ignore the fact that you still need to access the Internet to watch Hulu.com, Fancast, and YouTube or to download programs from iTunes -- and that many people use cable modems to get to the Internet.

What's more to the point of a post-TV world is that you no longer need an actual TV anymore to watch TV. You can now watch shows on a range of mobile devices that provide an immersive experience -- to the point that we may need a new term to describe a television program because what your watching is no longer on a TV and a program on a computer means, what -- that you're watching C++ on your laptop?

Yet the truth is there is still no simple alternative to cable or satellite to getting all the programs -- um, shows -- you might want to watch on whatever device you might want to watch them.

According to Chris Anderson in the Sept. cover story in Wired, "The Web is dead," 40 percent of advertising still goes to TV -- that's just one example that we don't live in a post-TV world.

Want another example? The editors of Wired and Fast Company apparently didn't get the memo -- the email, the text, mindmeld or whatever we'll be using in the near future -- that we truly livein a post-TV world. Both Wired and Fast Company featured extensive articles in their September issues to "The New Way to Watch TV" and "The New Fall Season," respectively.

Those born before the 1990s know that September meant new slate of TV shows. For the last couple of weeks, People Magazine has been thick with ads from the different networks touting their new Fall schedules. With cable starting off-season schedules -- new shows of TNT's "The Closer" and USA's "Psych" in the summer to capture viewers bored with reruns -- one might think that "the new fall schedule" isn't something that people anticipate any longer.

True to each magazine's DNA, Wired featured lots of McGyver-esque ways to cobble new ways to watch TV shows while Fast Company offered a look at content producers who are working to "redefine must-see viewing." Both articles are worth a look, depending on whether you're they type to want to "build a system that will make your neighbors cry" or the type interested in the latest content.

My real point here is that whether or not we live in a post-TV world, traditional media still often lives by a traditional media mindset. Fall means back-to-school for some while Sept. means big fall fashion issues for others. And it's not really surprising that Wired and Fast Company would kickoff Fall with looks at TV. Those of us in PR should not be afraid to consider old media conventions -- like back-to-school and the TV schedule -- to develop and pitch story angles.

Ten Observations about Executive Profiles

The executive profile has long been a staple of business journalism. But given some changes to the media world itself, here are some observations about the current state of the executive profile and some lessons PR functions can consider.

1. Fortune has always favored profiles of well-known CEOs of large companies -- witness the deluge of cover stories on Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs. If Fortune does not profile a well-known company or CEO, it then turns to a lieutenant (they're always called lieutenants, never colonels, I don't know why). For example: "Warren Buffett's Mr. Fix-It."
   
2. Fortune does run articles on CEOs of smaller companies, though generally the company has to be a cool, innovative startup.
   
3. Fast Company profiles lesser-known executives with an interesting story to tell. It helps if the if they executive -- doesn't have to be a CEO -- works at well-known. Example: "How Nike's CEO Shook Up the Shoe Industry," which graced the cover of the print version under the headline: "The World's Most Creative CEO: Nike's Mark Parker Uses Elite Athletes, Artists & His Own Show Designs to Drive a $34 Billion Business."
   
4. The different headlines for the print and online articles provides a lesson into what might sell as a cover line for print as opposed to what you need for a good, search-optimized headline for the online space. The Online headline is shorter, mentions keywords faster (Nike, CEO and shoe) and avoids words that aren't search-relevant (artists, athletes, creative, elite, and Mark Parker).
5. Forbes runs profiles of CEOs at large companies to depict a buy or sell opportunity or profiles of small, private companies as an opportunity of what to watch and invest in if the company ever goes public. Fortune and Fast Company often write profiles that offer lessons learned or interesting case studies. Forbes often seems to select executives based on the magazine's contrarian perspective.
6. The articles are detailed and well researched, but they tend to show one aspect of the executive. Whether Fortune, Fast Company, Forbes, Bloomberg BusinessWeek -- all the profiles generally have a single narrative, no matter how lengthy. Fast Company likes creativity or innovation so their articles often portray those qualities. Fortune and Forbes like turnaround stories (but you really have to prove that turnaround has occurred (more on this, below). Forbes in particular likes to tell stories that have a lot of drama to them, a CEO undertaking a heroic struggle to launch or save a company.
7. Only after a downfall or misstep, will a follow-up story show a more nuanced portrayal of the executive. For example, Mark Hurd got tremendous, positive coverage (including a Forbes cover story) since taking over H-P in 2005. However, after he was pushed out last month, suddenly stories appeared that said a lot of employees did not like Hurd and that, while great at cutting costs, he was not a great manager, and made some short-term gains at the expense of long-term investments -- and that the alienation of employees and his own board were large factors in the decision to fire Hurd. (I'm not taking sides here, I'm merely pointing out that a different take on the impact of Hurd's management style came to light only after he had left the company.) The same is true for Alex Bogusky, the former co-chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky was cited in dozens of Fast Company articles over the past few years, with always glowing anecdotes, quotes, etc. It's only after he stepped down that we get a more complete picture. In "Alex Bogusky Tells All: He Left the World's Hottest Agency to Find His Soul," we find out thata Bogusky could be a tyrant at work (basically telling everyone in his then-Miami offices that the company was going to relocate shortly to Boulder, CO, and cutting out key members who stayed in Miami), that he fired a great copywriter one time to make the point that no one's job was sacred, etc. Some of the aspects of being a bad boss are not unique to Bogusky. But it didn't seem too difficult for Fast Company to find people who provided the Bogusky-as-bad-boss storyline after he stepped down.
   
8. The point is that if you do manage a high profile visibility campaign for your executive, negative stories could appear after that executive leaves the company. Usually those postmortem stories don't make the companies look that good (even H-P after making the decision to get rid of Hurd) -- so companies should be prepared that negative stories could arise at that time.
9. Telling a turnaround story to get the attention of the national business media is difficult. For public companies, you need to show a certain number of quarters of positive results -- and you need validation from analysts who go on record saying that the company has turned around. Sometimes organizations want to tell a corporate change story, but again, you need hard, objective facts to make that case to a reporter. (A decade ago, a client wanted to tell Fortune and BusinessWeek they had made a significant shift in their culture, exemplified by an increase in their US marketing budget of $10 million -- which could have been an interesting hook, except that their overall US marketing budget, which did not go to us, was already at $90 million; the story did not fly because the reporters did not feel a 10 percent increase actually represented a culture change -- a point we had made before contacting the reporters.)
10. You need to have a good story. This seemingly obvious point often gets overlooked. A good story could be a stock increase, entry into a new market, the success of a new technology or device. It often is not the fact that a company has signed a new partnership deal that has no dollar amount attached to it. It combines a good narrative with objective facts. And, PR functions need to figure out the payoff for the the reporter and outlet. By payoff, I mean: what will the readers get after spending time with the article: will it be an investment idea, a management tip, something for them to try or buy? Too often, we forget to think about what need for the reader that the story we're pitching will address and solve. But it's a key aspect that editors consider.
    

Points 7 and 8 may not be relevant for most PR functions out there, but I was struck by recent coverage at how much negative information about celebrity CEOs did not make it into profiles that had helped establish these CEOs as celebrities.

Let me know if you agree or disagree with these observations.

Fast Company on the Future of Podcasts

Will podcasts replace radio? Fast Company's current issue profiles Adam Carolla in "How Adam Carolla Became a Podcast Superstar."

Interestingly, the article claims that Carolla is making money through his podcasts yet ends the article by quoting Carolla as saying:

"I would have a hard time calling myself a pioneer, sitting around talking while Donny records it and puts it on the Internet," he tells me on the ride back to his house. But the outsidery angst that his fans adore is part of the equation. It's tough to be first. "Think of all those guys who played for the NFL in the '40s and '50s," he says, looming perilously close to a rant. "They made $7,000 a year and had to work at car dealerships in the off-season," he says, pulling into his driveway. "Maybe we'll spend a bunch of money and time, and 20 years later... ." He pauses, does the math. "Ashton Kutcher will get rich off what we thought of. I don't know."

So is Carolla making money? Will podcasts replace radio? The shuffle music format seen on some stations like MikeFM in Boston, Lansing and other markets. in which they play everything, seems like it could be easily replaced by hooking your iPod to your car's radio. If you do that, then podcasts could attract listeners who otherwise might listen to radio.

I'm still a believer in (and a listener of) radio. But I'm not sure if my children will be. I think podcasts, like other online content, will have to charge subscriptions because advertising revenue alone won't support podcasts. But I do think radio stations will have to consider charging for online content they provide.

In the meantime, check on the sidebar to the Carolla article, "A Look at the Ever-Expanding Podcast Universe." It provides a good overview.

Fast Company Validates Our Prediction: Live Integrated Real-time Interactive Multimedia Web Events Will Become More Common in 2010

In its current issue, Fast Company profiles the business model of Ustream as "the future of live media."

I wonder if Fast Company read our list of predictions for 2010 -- namely Prediction #10: Live Integrated Real-time Interactive Multimedia Web Events Will Become More Common in 2010.

Check out the Fast Company article, "Payday: Ustream's Pay-Per-View Online Entertainment: Will Ustream's pay-per-view experiment forge a business model for live Internet video?"

It's great to see that Fast Company has validated another of our predictions.

Good Lessons on Leveraging Events for PR

I know a lot of organizations are cutting back on events. But there are still times when they are necessary.

In the current issue of Fast Company, Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something, a nonprofit, provides an instructive postmortem of an event that Do Something held.

Key points from the article, Stinking it Up: We had a big party, but got no buzz. Lessons from a PR failure," included:

• Find a good story happening at the event -- not just who's being honored. Lublin's example: Boys Like Girls (a band playing at the event) has "a pet turtle named Dorota, named after the Gossip Girl character, and they met Zuzanna Szadkowski, who plays Dorota, at the event.
• If you have celebrities, be exclusive with the media to get bigger play.
• Don't forget to work with bloggers and others in the social media space (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
• Make sure to get a photographer, and then to send photos to appropriate outlets.
• Strategize after the event. What worked, what didn't.
  
• Follow up. Not just to make sure articles hit, but to leverage those articles by bookmarking them (via Digg), tweeting about them, etc.
  

The Prospect for Hyperlocal Continues to Look Good -- But can it capture the ad market?

As print media continues to shed reporters and readers, the hyperlocal continues to show potential. That's because while there will always be sources for national news, people still want local news.

The problem for marketers is that there may be too many hyperlocal sites online and those sites don't generate mass-market traffic, making for a very fragmented user base. Targeting hyperlocal blogs and sites can be a great way to generate coverage, but it takes more effort to reach the many hyperlocal sites, and those sites reach a smaller group than maligned print media.

In an interesting story, "Can Anyone Tap the $100 Billion Potential of Hyperlocal News?," Fast Company looks at the problem from an advertising perspective -- that's the $100B in question.

What's interesting about news by search engine is that it has enabled users to select the news that interests them, which is a far less worthy slogan than the Times' "All the news that's fit to print." (Will the Times have to update its slogan to "All the news that's fit to text?")

While a lot of people consider it to be better, news by search engine (NBSE) actually destroys substantial value. By way of example, the Boston Globe was worth $1.1B when the Times bought it a decade ago. But now the Times can't even give away the paper, despite the fact that it's the market leader, is nationally known, wins journalism awards, etc.

The bottom-line is that hyperlocal should survive, but it won't pick up all the advertising dollars that no longer go to print.

I'm not sure where that money will go, but I do know that's bad news for traditional journalism even as its practiced online. Fully researched journalism takes time, resources and money, and without subscription fees and without advertising support, only a few outlets will be able to maintain journalistic standards.

Some colleagues and clients have been talking about the implications of that. It is in the interest of PR functions that journalism maintains its credibility. I'm going to explore this further in future posts. Let me know what you think.

Should Agencies Be Their Own Clients?

Why shouldn't agencies be their own clients -- develop and market their own brands?

Increasingly, ad agencies are considering going into business for themselves: creating a brand, producing the product, and selling the item.

As Ben Maldon, managing partner BBH Labs, told Danielle Sacks at Fast Company, "By creating our own brands, we wanted to make ourselves recession-proof -- or at least more recession-proof than other agencies."

A look at what a few are calling "New Idea Agencies," the article, "More Creative Shops Are Commercializing Their Own Product Lines: With major advertisers cutting costs, creative shops are increasingly commercializing their own product ideas," provides some interesting insight as to why agencies should be their own clients. The article also provides a couple of reasons clients might want to work with "New Idea Agencies."

Here are two good reasons to be your own client:

• You become commercially aware. According Carl Johnson, cofounder, Anomaly, "When I started a million years ago, I almost didn't know money had anything to do with the advertising business. You had a meeting, took a brief, made some work. It seemed enormously detached from selling something to people."
• "You get exposure to the full gory detail of how clients make and lose money," Malbon said.

Here are a couple of reasons why being your own client may not be good or easy:

• It's is a big distraction to ongoing client work.
• Clients may wonder: are they working for me to putting their best efforts into their product?
  
• You may get specialized insight into the category, yet it also prevents you from taking on from competitors in the same category.
• Your partners in the development and manufacturing of your product may represent a conflict with a future prospective client.
  
• Since you're potentially investing not only your own time but also your own money into a product, you could wind up losing both.
• If your brand fails, your people may lose equity they shouldn't have counted on, but did anyway. That's a double loss.
  
• If you need to run your own business to understand the pressures your clients feel, you may need to change how you operate.

By the way, one of the more amusing points made in the article is that one of the advertising executives said they did not spend a dime on advertising:

JOHNSON: One of the most amusing things is, of course, we haven't bought a single ad in support of any of our brands. Not one.

VITRANO: That is incredible.

JOHNSON: Why would we? You can do so much if you know what you're doing with product placement, sponsorship, digital PR. It's that whole "I haven't got any money, so I'll have to think." It makes you much better at grinding out media without paying.

Well, when it comes to spending their own money, advertisers said they did not buy ads, but relied on several marketing disciplines, including digital PR. Very interesting endorsement.

Are Slogans Dead?

This week's articles seem to all be about what's dead or not.

No question that a whole lot of traditional media -- and PR -- is changing.

In the Dec. issue of Fast Company, best-selling authors Dan Heath & Chip Heath argue that we should "Fight the Urge to Think in Clever Taglines." (The article was re-titled from "Kill the Slogans Dead" for the online version.) "Made to Stick: The Anti-Slogan Argument: Fight the urge to think in clever taglines."

Robert Scoble on How Tech Can Save the Newspaper Industry

I've written a lot about the problems of the newspaper industry. Tech blogger and Fast Company columnist, Robert Scoble, wrote an interesting article, "What Newspapers Can Learn From the Tech Industry: Technology has caused many of the newspaper business's woes. Here's how it can play a role in the industry's survival." It worth reading.

Dell's Blog Campaign Clicks In -- Even to this Blog

It took less than 2 days, but Dell found me, and posted a comment about my previous posting that referenced Dell.

I didn't really expect a comment from them since my article did not reference a problem with Dell (as Jeff Jarvis famously did a few years back) .

Here is some background from RichardAtDell:
- On average there are 4000 conversations online everyday about Dell. We do not respond to all of them...in some cases we drop by, listen and learn and go back with a stronger and better customer point of view inside our business every day.
- since we started our work the negative commentary about Dell has declined by 30% and positive commentary has increased;
-sharing of nearly 5000 "accepted customer solutions" has reduced costs
- the team can point to retained and new sales
-Ideastorm produced ideas that were not on the product roadmap which have generated increased sales for systems with Linux operating systems; continuing to offer XP; Product (Red) and other business improvements
- generally, more and more of customers are coming online, connecting and sharing information. There is a value to us in the direct relationship we have with our customers, given that it underpins our business model and is what we are all about at DELL.

Some very interesting points.

PS -- Can you even do a PS on a blog? -- RichardAtDell, I would love to spend a few minutes discussing lessons learned for a future article about blogging relations. Please let me know if that's possible.

Corporate Buzz Words: Been-There-Done-That

For all those who dislike goal-oriented, mission-critical organizations that think outside the box, play outside the box and put on a dog-and-pony show, check out a fun Fast Company blog, "Work/Life: Business Buzz Words We Can Safely Get Rid Of." Written by Tom Stern, the post is available here.

By the way, moving forward (as it were), Work/Life Balance is a phrase I'd nominate as annoying -- since I know I have not achieved it, and am fairly certain no one I know has.