Screen addiction is a real thing, and is something that leads to anxiety and loneliness, and is something we've been writing about for several years now.
We've talked about living in an age of anxiety, and that's not diminishing, unfortunately.
We've recommended that when appropriate, companies should consider emphasizing how they can help reduce stress. (Even B2B companies can consider talking about how they help reduce stress for decision makers.)
We've also noted the rise of mindfulness and apps to help guide people -- last week, three different people urged us to download the same mindfulness app, and it seemed like a cult. (We tried it but had difficulty with it, and kept urging the narrator to speed things up, feeling like the 10-minute session was taking too long. Clearly we've got work to do.)
At the very least, let's agree: The more time we spend with our devices, the more time we need with actual human beings."
Interesting, the article notes, retailers and real estate developers are commissioning designs that turn places into gathering places. For retailers, that's an advantage over online retailers. For developers of commercial buildings, offering "lots of greenery, soft seating and even carefully chosen accents and music," are succeeding in "inviting tenants and guests to interact."
So Bloomberg Businessweek is validating our prediction. But in the interest in helping reduce our readers' stress, we're going to keep this blog short so that you can turn off your device, and start interacting with real humans.
In professional sports, you'll sometimes see a star athlete who was setting all kinds of records get traded or sign with another team -- and then flop.
Same athlete. Same sport. Different team, culture and fans.
And very different results. Star on one team, flop on another -- even if the athlete is healthy.
There are too many examples to cite but it happens every season, in every sport. And this is after scouting reports, tryouts, conversations with the athlete and their agent. And still, fairly often, there's a problem, and the player is traded away or waived.
Chemistry is an important part of why a player will succeed on one team, fail on another.
Chemistry is also important in client and agency relationships, a lesson I learned early on in the agency business.
There must be chemistry on the agency team and with the client across the table. At Ketchum, when I was starting out, I asked then-CEO Dave Drobis what was a secret to winning new business. It comes down to chemistry, he told me: Chemistry on the agency side and chemistry across the table. The agency team needs to show that they can work together and they need to show they can work well with the client. Chemistry may even be more important than great ideas, he said, because you can have terrific ideas but be so unpleasant to work with that the client won't hire you.
Chemistry must be part of the agency culture. These days agencies often have some employees working remotely and others have people in the office but they're sitting at their desks with headphones on, barely interacting with their on-site colleagues. It's more important than ever that team members feel like they're part of something. So it's more important than ever that agencies figure out their culture, how to make working there and for various clients is rewarding, challenging and fun. They need to feel supported and that they have a voice and are valued. (That's true, too, for professional athletes, too.)
Chemistry isn't always about liking someone. In my second PR job, I was hired with one real goal: the EVP at the agency hated getting calls at 4:30 every Friday from a particularly unhappy client. My job: stop the client from calling to complain on Friday afternoons. I came in, figured out how to work with the day-to-day client, and we got great results: a mention on "The Tonight Show," articles in Forbes, Fortune, Businessweek, CNN, Time, Newsweek and other top national media. The client was tough and intimidating, and may not have ever truly warmed to me, but we found a way to work together. After a couple of years, she left the company, and was replaced by a much nicer, easier-going person. The problem: he wasn't a good fit in the client organization, and we couldn't get the info we needed to pitch stories. Without compelling stories the original client was about to identify through her network inside the company, there was a big drop in our results. The day-to-day client contact was the only variable that changed but it was a critical factor in our success. So what we mean by chemistry is more than likability. It can be something more elusive.
Clients who pick lowest price over chemistry may do themselves a disservice. We certainly understand cashflow pressures, and we hate spending client money when we don't have to. But we learned an important from one of our clients, a biotech manufacturer who has a rule to not take on clients whose main criteria is achieving the lowest cost possible. The reason: Saving money can get in the way of accomplishing the program's goal. (Our biotech client can point to situation after situation in which penny-wise-but-pound-foolish clients, asked to cut the wrong corners, which resulted in delays and additional costs.) If everyone's eyes are on the meter, you're always looking for short cuts.
Good chemistry helps when looking at the big picture. Again, when clients are focused on saving money, they keep different marketing functions operating separately. They think bringing in different vendors for regular meetings just costs money without paying off dividends. We had a client who kept the PR function separate from social media function. When it came time to make the most important product announcement for the next 24 months, we checked out the client's social media feeds only to see there was no mention of the major product upgrade. Turns out the social media team hadn't been briefed and hadn't prepared content about the new version of the company's flagship product. Reporters checking out the client's Twitter feed asked us why what we had called the company's most significant announcement wasn't even reaching their Twitter feed. Contrast that with another client who initially resisted having us talk with its webmaster but soon saw how letting us talk really benefited the client by allowing us to work together.
We recently saw something that said there are three key variables: Good, Fast and Cheap but generally you can get achieve only two of those. You can have something good and fast but that's rarely cheap. You can have something cheap and fast but that's rarely good. Or cheap and good but rarely fast.
Clients who prize cheap usually also want things done fast, and the result is the agency is unhappy -- because we always want to deliver something not just good but excellent -- and ultimately, so is the client.
Please note: we truly understand the financial pressures of clients. We understand the need to keep budgets under control. Back in the dot-com era, working at a big PR agency, we had a couple of clients that spent crazy amounts of money, especially considering that one had no real product, no customers and no revenue. They had a PR budget of $30,000 a month, hoping that would generate eyeballs (the term of the day) but they ran out of money by the third month, owing the agency $90,000 never collected.
That was a prime lesson for taking a different approach at Birnbach Communications to our clients -- they all had to real products, real customers and real revenue or funding. There's a balance between spending not enough money and spending too much. We're not trying to blame clients who need to be conservative with their budgets; we just have learned to walk away when clients ask us to reduce the hours and fees in our proposal, based on our experience of how much time a project will take -- because they often don't reduce their expectations. That affects and degrades the chemistry and trust.
So good chemistry is elusive. In some cases, chemistry is really a matter of trust across the table. There are steps we take to develop the chemistry and to build the trust and invest in the client relationship. When you have it, the agency team and client team can achieve success together. Which is what we all want.
In our previous blog, "5 Factors That Make It Harder to Break Into National Business Media," we discussed some of the challenges to getting ink in the national business media. In this article, we will talk about three tips to successfully getting the media's attention.
Understand the mission of the media outlet you're pitching. Forbes, Fortune and Bloomberg Businessweek may seem similar but they are very different. Forbes is interested in investing opportunities and providing contrarian perspectives. Fortune is interested in management (as opposed to investing though it does publish investing-specific issues) and Bloomberg Businessweek provides more of a news snapshot of the world as it affects business. Pitching a Bloomberg reporter on a company as an investment opportunity won't work -- just as you have to expect a Forbes reporter to ask about a company's valuation even if that's not directly relevant to the story.
Study the sections and opportunities that each media outlet offers. Each newspaper, magazine and website has different sections and columns. And each section or column offers a different path into coverage. For example, the Wall St. Journal has sections for Chief Information Officers and another for Chief Marketing Officers. There could be a way to tell a client's story through the eyes of its CIO that might be very different from the CMO's. There's a Journal columnist who handles work-and-family issues, and your client may have a story there. Fast Company has a section in which executives can offer something -- an app, a book, etc. -- that they highly recommend. And various publications offer a look at an executive's interesting office. We look at all those sections for ways to get our clients considered.
Get to know the reporters and how they approach their articles. Too often publicists, who are juggling many tasks, pitch based on media lists assembled by a database. These databases are helpful in tracking down contact info and background. But they are often not-quite-accurate. Reporters move around a lot these days, so we've seen a Washington Post reporter still listed as working for the Wall St. Journal -- six months after she joined the Post. We've seen reporters listed as covering one topic when they shifted beats. And sometimes the coverage details are broad enough to not be useful. It's important to learn what reporters cover and how they cover it. A reporter will cover news differently from a columnist. It's not enough to respond to a single story; too often it might be a one-off story that's not relevant to the reporter's regular coverage. We look at several weeks' worth of coverage and what they post on social media to get a sense of their approach and interest before we pitch. And then we look at the elements that are frequently included in their articles so that we can make sure to offer up those elements, too.
Look for alternative ways in. For one client, we played up the CEO's racecar-driving hobby to secure local coverage, and we got a good response from a Forbes editor who shares racecar driving as a hobby (though that did not lead directly to coverage). That's something we ask of new client teams. For another client, we recommended the CEO post comments to articles published online by the company's key trade magazine as a way to engage with its community. In one case, the publication contacted him to ask if he would give permission to use his comment as a letter to the editor. Of he said yes, and we got a double hit in the print edition.
Be creative get the reporter's attention. Look, this is from a while ago but a former colleague recently posted about this on LinkedIn, and it brought back memories. On behalf of RIM, we were trying to get attention of then BusinessWeek tech columnist, Stephen Wildstrom, to review a new product: The BlackBerry pager that offered email; one of the first portable email device available at the time. The question was: how to get Wildstrom's attention for a then-unknown startup launching a new product to compete against the Goliath of the day, Palm as it prepared to launch its Palm VII. My solution: I emailed WIldstrom several times during my commute home, always pointing out that I was emailing him while on the MBTA. After a couple of those commuting-time emails, WIldstrom requested review copies of the pager. The result: a terrific headline: "Close to Perfect Pocket E-Mail." For Stephanie Mehta, then a Journal reporter (who then went to Forbes and is now the editor at Fast Company) we pitched a story about the sector based on BlackBerry: "For Paging Industry, a Bet on Two-Way Gadgets."
By the way, as a side note, back in those days, people on the T spent their commuting time either reading a newspaper, magazine or book. I was something in a pioneer -- taking the blame here -- for spending my commute time by staring at a device. These days, we look for other creative ways to get a reporter's attention. (We'd be happy to provide more recent case studies.)
Make sure the pitch is relevant to the readers. This might seem obvious but sometimes agencies and their clients forget about this. They're excited to pitch good news about the client that they forget that the news may not, by itself, interest readers. A Fortune reporter once said, "That's good news for your client but for readers who don't follow your client or their sector, there's not much of a reason for them to stop and read my article about them." So we always look for how our clients' news fits in to what the reporter and his/her readers or viewers are interested in. What do the readers (or viewers) want or need to know? Another question we ask: why should the reporter or reader care about this story now (as opposed to six months from now)?
Leverage interest in timely news via "newsjacking." Newsjacking is a term that means taking advantage of a current events or news to communicate your brand's message or your subject-matter expertise. Most news events are probably not appropriate so you have to look for a natural connection, and move quickly. For one adoption nonprofit, during the Ebola crisis we advised their PR consultant on pitching the media to help tell how the charity was helping to get children out of infected areas. Another way to newsjack goes back to the BlackBerry days: we contacted reporters we were sure to cover the Palm VII launch with a detailed fact sheet that compared the BlackBerry to the known features of the pre-launch Palm VII. More recently, we did something similar for a startup client's digital compression technology ahead of a soon-to-launched competitive solution from a much-larger company. In most cases, what you want to do is become a resource for reporters, to be someone who can provide reliable insight into a situation.
Use social media to work with reporters. We want to be careful about suggesting alternative ways to contact reporters, like using social media. Once, a reporter contacted us via Twitter to conduct an interview, and that was fine, but the reporter contacted us. Another time, we were trying to figure out the reporter of an Economist article on artificial intelligence for a client of ours. The Economist does not use bylines so we could not tell who had written a particular article; by searching for the article on Twitter, we identified the reporter, and then contacted him by email. We did not want to try to insert ourselves into a conversation with that reporter or to contact him directly on Twitter without any introduction. Contacting him the regular way helped us secure an interview for the client and did not alienate the reporter by being too aggressive. (Keep in mind one the key rules of social media: don't be creepy.)
Think like a reporter. We look at clients and the stories they tell, and try to think like a reporter would, if encountering the client for the first time. It means taking an objective look at the organization, and asking, "Is this a story? Or is it a blog post?" Blog posts are valuable; they can help with SEO and drive traffic to your website to find out more about what you do. As a reporter, you're looking for something that will engage people outside the company, that tells a story readers didn't know, provides insight into something relevant to the consumers of that media outlet. That also means thinking through what a reporter will need to tell a compelling story -- what are the elements. For example, when pitching an NPR reporter, keep in mind they like natural sound so you need to give the reporter a sense if they can capture interesting/unusual sounds. Once you think like a reporter, you'll be better able to develop and pitch them a story that will work for them -- and you.
Let us know if you have any questions about these tips. Or let us know if we left out one of your favorite tips.
Securing national business coverage has never been easy. In preparing to talk to a prospective client recently, we thought it would be helpful to explain why it's gotten tougher -- even before you get to the client. Clients always want to know about relationships with the media but these days, even with a strong knowledge of the media and good relationships with reporters, there are other challenges to consider:
Shrinking news rooms. Newsrooms have seen dramatic cutbacks and buyouts. Before Feb. 2019, there were more than 1,000newsroom job cuts in 2019. There is real concern that some newsrooms are ghost newsrooms, with not enough reporters trying to fill up the newshole, and often relying on syndicated content. So it's harder to find reporters these days.
Increased demands on reporters. Concurrent with job cutbacks, the demands on reporters to produce and generate views has increased tremendously. Reporters typically have to file more stories, across different formats (you can read a news story on a radio station's website or watch a video on a print newspaper's website) all while posting content across social media to drive traffic back to the news organizations' website. That means reporters have to think harder about whether they'll even take an interview because of everything else they have to do as part of their jobs.
Some print outlets have reduced their publication schedule or size of their print editions. Forbes, Fortune, Fast Company, Inc., Entrepreneur and other prestige publications have reduced the number of issues they publish annually. Fortune used to 25 issues per year; in 2009, Fortune decreased the number of issues to 18. In 2019, it currently publishes 14 issues a year. Forbes published 22 issues in 2010 and current publishes 14 per year. Entrepreneur published 12 issues per year in 2016 but cut back to 10 in 2017 (sorry Feb. & Aug.). Meanwhile, some outlets have reduced their page size so there's less space per issue for news. (A client recently asked about taking out an ad in the Boston Globe business section and we had to tell them that there's rarely any advertising in that section.) Fewer issues and smaller space means it's harder to get ink. There is, of course, still opportunities for online coverage but we still have to deal with fewer reporters with more demands they have to handle.
Reporters are harder to contact. We've already established that reporters are busier than ever, But they're also harder to reach than ever. There are more freelancers who regularly contribute to a specific news outlet without being an actual employee. That means you can't reach them by phone through the publication's main number. There might not only be no number to use to call those reporters, but increasingly some of the newer digital news sites themselves don't list their phone numbers -- other than for advertising. We used to be able to follow up by phone and by smiling and dialing but that's less possible these days. For a recent client project that targeted advertising/marketing reporters, we found that fewer than half our list included phone numbers; of the ones who had phone numbers listed, 90 percent were the organization's main number, and the dial-by-name directory did not include the name of the reporter (even if they were staff reporters). By the way, of the 10 percent who did have a phone number we could reach, their voicemails were full and did not take new messages. (This is without pointing out that reporters -- across the political spectrum -- are as distracted as the rest of us by the Washington, DC news.)
Tech reporters at national business media are more interested in Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google (aka FAANG of the Big Five), Microsoft and Twitter but not as interested in B2B technology. The products they seem most interested are smartphones, virtual assistants (i.e., Alexa); the issues that interest them are privacy, security, crypto and blockchain but not the underlying business tech that supports those products or issues. We know that cloud computing is hot but that doesn't mean reporters at national business publications -- the Journal, Times, Wired, Bloomberg, etc. -- are able to cover a company doing well in cloud computing. The fact is that those reporters are more interested in business issues than in tech issues, and at the same time, it's hard to sell B2B tech via articles in those publications. (Partly that's because it can be much more complicated for businesses to adopt new technology, as Walt Mossberg, the legendary Wall St. Journal tech columnist, told me more than once.)
We know this list is something most clients won't like reading -- we didn't like it ourselves but we try to give clients realistic assessments -- so we will tackle some ways to get into the national business media in a follow-up article.
In the meantime, let us what you think of these factors.
It may be a new year
but some of the trends we expect to generate media coverage in 2019 are ones
from prior years.
In this installment
about 2019 trends, we list four new predictions plus 17 ongoing trends that will continue in 2019. That's 21 predictions in one article. In some
cases, we will just mention the trend without much explanation because we've
covered them a lot before. (If you have any questions, post a comment and we'll
respond.)
Here are four new
predictions based on continuing trends.
Lawmakers will act against robocalls. Here’san
issue everyone can support. We all get too many robocalls, whether on our
cell phones or land lines. What’s gotten worse is not just how many of the
calls we each get but that most of these have spoofed caller IDs so you
think it might be a neighbor or someone you know. We expect lawmakers to pass
bills to reducing spoofing and robocalls. Already some of the phone
companies are expanding their offerings. One problem: you need a different
solution to combat the robocall problem on cell phones from the solution for
landlines.
More colleges will fail and college debt levels
will continue to be a significant issue for millennials. Some colleges can’t
afford to keep their doors open and many students can’t afford to pay for a
college education. The
former is an issue and the latter is huge problem for society. We expect
to see think pieces in 2019 (and beyond) about the plight of higher
education in America.
The implications of the (possible) end of Moore’s Law will generate think pieces. In
1965, Gordon Moore,a semiconductor pioneer, wrote a paper that
observed that that the number of
transistors on a chip would double every year while the costs are halved. We’ve
now reached a point where that no longer may be true. There are significant
implications if Moore’s prediction slows down so that instead of doubling
every year or two, the number of transistors increases every three to five
years. We’re not going to go into the implications here except to say we
expect there to be some coverage/debate about this in 2019.
Cashless-only
retail will gain momentum. This is a generational issue but millennials don’t seem to use
cash. They use Apple Pay, Venmo and other e-cash solutions but not cash. We
expect to see more stores open that are cashless-only – that won’t accept
cash. It won’t happen to supermarkets or hardware stores but it will be
more prevalent in neighborhoods and retailers catering to a younger,
cooler demographic. You might not even notice it happen if you, yourself,
rarely use cash at the register. But it will be a problem for older people
and people with lower income, including the 14.1 million unbanked adults,
according to the Wall St. Journal;
what’s disturbing is that the same article reported that, “Despite
consumers’ expanded access to banking, one in five households, or 22.7
million, didn’t use mainstream credit such as credit cards and mortgages
in the prior year.” That’s a lot of people who will be further cut off
from many parts of the economy.
Here’s our updated
list of ongoing trends:
The
Age of Anxiety continues. Chaos,
uncertainty, anger, a sense of helplessness and the near-constant news
notifications will continue to fuel our Age of Anxiety, especially since it
seems to be hard to escape.Even
broadcast journalists have commented on air that they’re overwhelmed in
trying to stay on top of and to process all the news – and that’s their
job. We expect many to experience news fatigue, take “news vacations” or
(aka a technology cleanses or digital detox, where they shut off all
notifications on their phones and take hiatuses from social media – even
though that’s nearly impossible to do. As we’ve said previously, in 2019,
we expect more coverage regarding stress, anxiety, mental health and ways
to de-stress. But the implications for marketers is this: 1) If consumers
are turning off news and social media, it will be harder to reach them via
ads, media relations and social media; and 2) They might be interested
consumer media that distracts them from their anxiety.
Concerns about Retailpocalypse and
Amazonification will continue to have an impact in 2019. More big brands will struggle, close
locations or declare bankruptcy this year. One change: we expect some
saber rattling about whether or not to clamp down on Amazon’s market
power. The good news is there will be some innovations in the sector, and
some retailers will do well despite Amazonification. The retail sector is
important in a consumer-driven economy but there are implications for real
estate (when locations go unrented for a long time), local unemployment
(the job market is strong but it may be hard for retail staff to
transition to another industry), local economies (what happens to cities
when retailers abandon them), local media (which benefits from local ads,
circulars, etc.)
The gig economy, robotics and automation and
income inequality will continue to spark think pieces about the nature of
work. Last year, we said think
pieces about the nature of work would be sparked by the labor shortage and
the gig economy. This year, we expect think pieces to be driven by those
two factors plus concerns about jobs of the future as industrial robots,
and automation begin to make inroads in factory settings. Also look for
articles about rethinking income inequality, the social safety net and the
future of unions for gig workers who don’t necessarily get minimum wage,
unemployment benefits, vacation and sick days or employer-contributions
for workers’ comp, Social Security and Medicare. We also expect that there
will be calls to better measure the gig economy.
The debate about how to regulate Facebook,
Google and Twitter will continue. It’s clear that social media companies continue to not be able to
stay ahead of their problems. Congress knows it needs to do something in 2019 to address data
privacy, hate speech/bullying that isn’t being removed/policed fast enough
and election interference/misinformation from Russia. The new goal of any
new regulation should be to go into effect before 2020 but we are
skeptical that this will be possible because we’d bet that Facebook,
Twitter and Google would have addressed their problems if they could have,
rather than be regulated by Congress. There will also be articles looking
at technology’s role in a democracy. Part of the problem: social media
makes it easy to share content before users vet it, and that’s something
Congress can’t mandate.
Fake news won’t fade in 2019. Partof the problem is that the term “fake news” can
mean almost anything: from news you disagree with or don’t like (but are
actually true) to stories that are part of misinformation campaigns (and are
factually false). If we can’t agree on a definition of it, and if Facebook,
Google and Twitter all have trouble dealing with the fake news scourge,
how will regulations and Congress be able to solve what the social media
giants can’t? There’s no light at the end of the tunnel since there are
calls that even the fact-checking at
Facebook must be checked. It’s harder than ever to trust our institutions,
which adds to the anxiety so many are experiencing.
Cord cutting turns out to be complicated and
expensive. Over
the next 18 months, we’ll experience a glut as more streaming services get
launched.It’s getting harder to find
all the things you want to watch. Something available on Netflix last
month may be found on Hulu next month and then some new service next year.
So to watch everything you want, you’ll have to have subscriptions with Netflix,
Amazon Prime, HBO Go, and dozens more. Cable might be simpler and less
expensive.
IoT will continue to be victim to
cyberattacks. Thishasn’t gotten a lot of attention but we think it will. As reported
by a friend in a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, recently a cruise
line offered “a proprietary mobile app, which unlocks your
cabin door and lets you book activities on and off the ship….(A passenger’s)
roommate used it to prank her, remotely flashing the lights and opening
the blinds in their cabin.” Seems like a harmless prank but it
speaks to more nefarious possibilities. We’re worried that there will be more IoT cyberattacks, as IoT, Smart
Homes and virtual assistants go mainstream. Perhaps the only advantage of
having to get up and walk over to a light switch is that hackers can’t
hack your home.
There’s still not enough cybersecurity
protection or privacy. They
say millennials don’t care much about privacy but we think that will likely
change as they get older. There’scertainlynot enough of cybersecurity.
Cloud computing will stay strong. This may be the one tech trend that has yet
to experience a backlash. Cloud computing remains an important paradigm,
and we don't see that changing in 2019, which means that it's a trend that
may not get that much ink because editors are always looking for stories
that answer "What's new?" and that move the story forward. That
said, for business press, there's still interest in the horse race between
Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure and Google Cloud Platform. We expect
to see more about "cloud agnostic" or “Not Amazon” as a key
message that will help lure customers that compete with Amazon to look
beyond AWS.
Driverless cars will generate attention but
still won’t appear at local dealership. Closer on the horizon is more electric
cars, with China’s plans
to eliminate all new combustion cars and trucks by 2030. There are lots of
challenges to be addressed either way, like having are enough charging
stations for electric cars and investing in the type of infrastructure –
in urban, suburban and rural areas – that can enable driverless cars to
operate including in bad weather. Oh, and there will continue to be a lot
of coverage of Tesla.
E-Scooters
will become more of a thing in 2019. Some of us first heard
about a vague problem of e-scooters like Bird that began cluttering up sidewalks
in some cities. We expect them to gain more attention in
2019, becoming a full-fledged trends, much the way urban bike share and bike
lanes did (it seems to us) in 2018. (They were around before 2018 but
people began talking about bike lanes much more, we feel.)
Corporate boycotts and consumer boycotts will
continue. These are boycotts by
companies in order to demonstrate distance from controversial programs and
personalities. We also expect boycotts of companies that are boycotting
those controversial people and programs.
Drug pricing will continue to get a lot of
attention. The problem: it’s expensive to
develop new drugs – on average it costs $2.6 billion – and pharma companies
need to use successful drugs to fund future development. There won’t be an
easy solution so we don’t expect much from Congress except outrage.
Wearable tech will still not be as mainstream
as people in the industry were hoping. But wearable will make quiet inroads so that before you know it
(probably not in 2019, though), lots of things will have built-in
technology.
The need for more Americans to pursue STEM education
and careers continue to be important. With a looming labor shortage (in some fields), businesses are
looking for employees with a firm grasp of science, technology,
engineering and math (STEM). We think funding for STEM will continue to
keep U.S. businesses competitive.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality still won’t be everywhere yet. VR and AR still aren't fully mainstream
because people still don't yet have a strong-enough need for it. Watching
a basketball game on Oculus is cool but not practical in how many people
watch content these days, on their phones while in public spaces. (Can you
imagine a subway car filled with people wearing heavy headsets?)
3-D content and 3-D printers will still not be
as popular as they are cool.
Let us know if you disagree or agree with us selection. Did we miss something? Overstate things? We're happy to hear from you.
In our blog from Dec. 19, 2018, "4 Additional Media Trends for 2019: including 'News Fatigue,'" we noted, "Digital media isn't the sure thing it was once thought to be, despite the lack of traditional media's baggage (like lack of printing presses)."
Specifically, we predicted:
The incredible shrinking newsroom. A decade ago, most newsrooms used to employ more reporters to cover the news, and the amount of pages that newspapers and magazines had to fill was larger. Today, news reporters have to cover more news with fewer resources and less space. Locally, at the Boston Business Journal, a terrific weekly, staff reporters typically file four or so stories a day, may have a weekly newsletter they produce and then must write a longer article for the weekly printed edition. Radio reporters now also have to write up a print story for the website in addition to producing their stories for the radio. All of this is to say that there are fewer reporters and they have to produce much more. This makes it challenging for them to take meetings, cultivate sources, uncover stories that need to be told. According to the UNC School of Media and Journalism's Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, the result of all this is that "Many newspapers have become ghosts of their former selves, both in terms of the quality and quantity of their editorial content and the reach of their readership."
Unfortunately, that prediction was validated by Axios in January: "More than 1,000 media jobs lost in one day." Many of those jobs cuts were handed down by BuzzFeed, which eliminated 250 jobs; Gannett, which cut more than 20 jobs; and Huffington Post, a division of Verizon. Overall, Verizon Media cut 800 jobs, approx. 7 percent of its global workforce. Axios also noted job losses at Vox and Refinery29, two digital-only media sites.
According to Axios, the shrinking newsroom "exists at the local, national and global levels, and across digital, print and television operations." For another article about the problems of newsrooms, check out AdWeek's "Layoffs Likely to Continue in This ‘Wrenching’ Period for Media Industry." Axios also sees the impact on "the cheap sales of websites that had raised tons of money, like Mic.com and Mashable.
Those two sites are still producing interesting, good journalism but their troubles may be self-fulfilling. In conversations this past week, we were asked about getting into Wired, the Times, Wall St. Journal and TechCrunch by several new and prospective clients. But no one asked about Mashable -- which would have been on that list two years ago.
We're not trying to throw shade at Mashable; again, we're fans just as we're fans of Re/code. Our point is this: good, credible journalism is only one factor you need to have a successful news organization. There are a number of variables news organizations need to have a profitable, sustaining business model. You need to figure out the costs and resources (editors, reporters, tech people and infrastructure to deliver the news) and how to pay for that (paywall, phased paywall or no paywall; subscriptions, advertising, native ads and clickbait, sponsorships and underwriters for nonprofit outlets.
Unfortunately, while there are many news sites and tech news sites, very few have made it work. Which means that we expect the newsroom to continue to shrink. And we wish we weren't right about this.
We certainly don't have an answer to the business problems plaguing the news sector. But do you? Let us know if you have any suggestions.
Today I feel
overwhelmed by my To-Do list. What I really need is a To-Don't list... The only
problem: For a long time, I haven't had time to develop one.
With the start of a new year, I decided to identify some resolutions for things I need either to not
do or to stop doing.
Don't multitask. There may be some tasks when multitasking is
fine -- like folding laundry while listening to a podcast -- but it often
seems that multitasking takes longer to finish each of the tasks than if I
handled them separately. So I'm going to try to monotask (as that a word?)
-- focus on one task as time. And I will try to reduce distractions. (For more, check out "This chart will show you when you can multitask and when you can’t" from Fast Company. For some tips to reduce multitasking, check out the productivity hacks: 1) Banish desk chaos. 2) Ask for deadlines. 3) Make a night-before plan. 8 Plan for the unexpected (so let's explain that the numbers are from the article, which you should check out.)
Don't spend too much time on Twitter,
Facebook, BuzzFeed.
This will be a bit tricky since we help clients with social media. That
said, it's one thing to be engaged on social media when working for a
client and another because I'm bored or finding it hard to focus. I may
have caught up with what friends are doing but I probably should pick up
the phone and talk to some of those people. One strategy: to set strict
limits on personal use to avoid the somewhat empty feeling I get -- the
same as when I binge on junk food or crappy TV shows.
Don’t put off the work that’s
tough to do or is important but less interesting. No one likes doing the hard work, the heavy
lifting, the sometimes-joyless tasks. But if you put off those tasks, you’ll
never get them done, and they’ll weight heavier on you. So I’m going to try
to start the day doing the least appealing but important tasks first, and
then reward myself by handling the things I enjoy doing. I’m hoping knowing
there’s something else I look forward to as soon as I finish the
unpleasant task will serve as an incentive to more efficiently get through
the dreaded work.
Don't break my schedule into tiny bite-size
units. I have a tendency to
overschedule but I've found that when I give myself permission to block
out an hour or two to do a project (rather than trying to squeeze time
into any available free moment), the project is better, and completed more
efficiently. The challenge is that work can expands to fill the time you
have allocated -- like a meeting that should take only 30 minutes but
expands to an hour because that's the amount of time we all agreed to. If
we get everything done in a meeting in 40 minutes, I'm going to try to end
the meeting and move on to something else on my list.
Don't try to squeeze too much in. Overscheduling is a problem. The solution to
back-to-back-to-back meetings and tasks isn't always to squeeze more
things into less time or to multitask our way through meetings where we're
paying half-attention. It gets worse if we let ourselves get distracted by
emails, texts or notifications.
Don't go to a meeting unprepared or without an
agenda. I learned this lesson a long
time ago and it's still important. You don't have to stick to the agenda
but the process of thinking about an agenda and the goals for a meeting
make it more productive than going in and trying to "wing it."
Don’t rely on PowerPoint. When you have to give a presentation, you
have to give a presentation. Sometime people feel they have to get through
the presentation – so much so that they don’t interact with the others in
the room. It's important to be flexible and make sure you answer when clients
ask a question, even if you haven’t reached the section later in the
presentation that addresses that question. It looks like you’re dismissing
their concerns when you say, “I’ll get to that on slide 23.” We want
sessions to be conversations rather than a droning presentation, and when
clients ask questions, they’re telling you their priorities, concerns and
interests, and it’s important to pay attention.
Don't get caught up in crossing off everything
on my to-do list. We
all put a lot of pressure to get everything done but that's not always
possible. Sometimes things come up that need to immediate attention. It's
okay to carry some things over to another day. Especially because I should not let myself be ruled by my to-do list; for example, while I feel better keeping my desk organized, that's not a priority over more important, more immediate deadlines. So I will try to give
myself permission to not cross off everything everyday -- of course, I
still have to meet deadlines.
Don't get upset that most things take more
time than I estimate them.
Sometimes things do take longer. The information I thought I had may not
be as accurate or solid as it needs to be. Or it takes more back-and-forth
with a reporter to schedule an interview. Not over-scheduling may help
with this.
Don't continue to do the same things the same
way every day -- and expect that things will turn out different. That's Einstein's definition of insanity.
Some routine is okay but you can't expect things to be different if you
don't try alter your routines.
Don't let evaluating things delay making
decisions to seize opportunities. By that I mean, make sure to think about trying new things. Look
at the pros and the cons, and then don't belabor things too long. Make a
decision and jump.
Don't forget to check in with the team and
with clients. Don't assume everyone
knows the status of projects or has all the information they have to get
their jobs done. Sometimes emails get overlooked or forgotten. It's
important to check in to make sure everyone has current info and
expectations.
Don't be so busy that I can't stop and look at
the bigger picture for a client, team member or myself. Sometimes it doesn't take as much time as I
think to consider the big picture. I was once at a strategy workshop when
the leader asked, "How much time do you think it takes to make a
strategic plan for a client?" The consensus seemed to be that it would
take a couple of hours. Instead, the workshop led us through an exercise
that got us developing a strategic plan within the hour.
Don’t hope that bad news will disappear. No one likes
confrontations but it’s better to address bad news as early as possible
rather than hiding your head in the sand. You need to figure a solution
and address it early because otherwise it can become a bigger issue.
Don't feel the solution involves more of me. I've seen this with other small businesses.
The boss thinks the only solution is for him or her to spend more time on
a problem. Long-term, that doesn't work but the demands on the CEO are
such that we need to be able to shift gears. My business is team oriented,
and I need to keep the team engaged; another way of saying this is: don't
overlook the talent and insight on the team -- make sure they're empowered
to offer recommendations.
Don't check email, various news sites
constantly. In fact, during vacations,
I've turned off all notices and alerts. They're too much of a distraction.
But I'm also turning off the sound for text messages and emails when I
need a solid block of time.
Don't watch TV or Netflix when I have other
things to do. That goes with the not
wasting time on social media (number 2, above) but warrants, alas, it's
own bullet even if I'm just entering time sheets for client billing.
Don't forget to keep in touch with people I
enjoyed working with. We
all get so busy that we forget the personal -- the people we like working
with. We do too much by text or by checking out their posts on social
media but forget that that's not a substitute for actual conversations.
Staying in touch with friends and colleagues is important even if it's not
work-related.
Don’t get too busy that I feel I can’t
organize my desk.
When you’ve got lots of deadlines, it’s easy to let things pile up on my
desk. But eventually, the piles get overwhelming. When I started out, I
used to joke that cleaning off my desk was basically my job: it meant that
I had completed all my assignments. To an extent, that’s still true. Once
I’ve filed (and throwing out or recycling is filing) things off my desk, I
feel better and more organized. And I know I don’t have to clean the
entire mass of piles at the end of the day; a little bit at a time is perfectly
ok. So that’s what I’m going to do after posting this article.
Don't try to get by with too little sleep. I will try to get more regular sleep. (Let's
see how that goes.)
That's a big list, with some overlapping items. I will likely add more over time.
Meanwhile, here are a few To
Do's that I want to incorporate:
Set aside specific time to
respond to email. Right
now, I tend to let the sound of arriving emails distract me from whatever
task is at hand. It can take minutes to recover from a distraction so I’m
going to set aside time to answer emails. There will be exceptions such as
if I’m expecting an important, time-critical email or on days when we have
an important client news.
Define what results look
like. In other words, don’t assume
everyone understands what the results should be. It’s important to spend time
setting expectations in advance. At the same time, make sure the
deliverables are relevant to the client so that it’s not like opening a
pack of socks for your birthday when you expected an Xbox.
Keep upgrading and changing
skill sets and talents to fit the needs of an ever-changing marketplace. It’s easy to be so busy that you feel you
don’t have time to learn or that you’re so good, you have nothing else to
learn. You can’t succeed or continue to succeed by being complacent. You’ve
got to continue to learn new approaches, look for new insights and
understandings as the business world evolves. Sticking to what you used to
do, and doing only the things that used to work, won’t get you very far.
We have a client who pivoted his business three times, moving to where the
market was heading, buying new equipment and either retraining current
employees to get new skills or hiring new employees who had those skills.
The results: the company made the Inc. 5000 of the Fastest Growing Private
Companies for three years as a 20-year-old company, when many companies’
growth starts to slow down.
Make my emails more actionable. Advice from Fast Company profile of the president of Land o' Lakes: Write in the subject line what the email is about. Tell the person up-front: is a decision needed or do you I need the recipient to look at something or is it a "When you have time, take a look at this?" -- so they can prioritize effectively.
"The imperative is to manage our time, not our work. This is why
the whole question of balance and finishing our work is insane. There are only
24 hours in a day, so what difference does it really make if you work 10 hours
or 14, given that there are a thousand potential hours of work? The real
question is the incredible rigor of what goes into the hours you allocate.
"As I look at the most effective people we've studied, a 'stop-doing' list or not-to-do list is more important than a to-do
list, because the to-do list is infinite. For every big, annual priority you
put on the to-do list, you need a corresponding item on the stop-doing list.
It's like an accounting balance.
"I’ve found that real change comes from genuine displeasure with
oneself. Anything less -- including the usual 'I really need to...lose
weight/get organized/exercise more often...' won’t survive the inevitable
periods of stress we all experience at one point or another."
For other tips to be
productive, check out the following:
I'm not a productivity expert and this list is more for me than trying to preach about some system to others, which is why I'm posting it on my blog (as opposed to trying to publish it somewhere).
I will try to check back at the end of the year to see how I did.
