Onlines
Observations on media, marketing, technology, and their convergence—online and off—from Collin Canright.
November 17th, 2011 by Canright Communications
In the last week or so Google has announced changes to its search algorithm that is designed to favor “fresh” content over old, stale items. The change is designed to “make sure you get the most up to the minute answers,” according to a post on Google’s blog.
In “Giving you fresher, more recent search results” Google Fellow Amit Singhal says that some 35% of searches will be affected, especially those that focus on:
- Recent events or hot topics
- Regularly recurring events
- Frequent updates
The change has significant and positive implications for marketers using content on their websites to improve search rankings. How? Ben Wallis, writing in the Marketing Pilgrim blog, says that it “comes down to having new content.”
As it happens, I am reading one of the best books on creating new content for business marketing I have read in a long time. Michael A. Stelzner’s latest book, Launch: How to Quickly Propel your Business Beyond the Competition, provides a start-to-finish plan for using content as the primary means of marketing your business. With Google’s new search algorithm favoring the new over the old, Stelzner’s advice is all the more relevant.
What gives the book its power is the credibility Stelzner brings. He practices what he preaches; many of the book’s examples are drawn from his own business, SocialMediaExaminer.com, a website that provides educational content, written in magazine style, to marketers.
I am a bend-the-page reader, and I’ve bent an awful lot of pages I want to go back to in Launch. Here are a few:
The Elevation Principle (p. 7)
“The elevation principle says that great content plus other people minus marketing messages results in growth.” The examples of audience identification and how the principle works at Hubspot and the SocialMediaExaminer.com are compelling.
The Three Gift Circles (p. 88)
Stelzner takes this idea of friends and family, current clients, and your prospect base from Seth Godin and shows how to give (or not give) appropriate gifts of content to each.
Creating an Editorial Guide (p. 119)
Stelzner explains how magazines use editorial calendars. But he doesn’t stop there. He provides an example of SocialMediaExaminer.com’s editorial guidelines and content calendar.
Creating and Using Primary Fuel (p. 127)
This chapter describes the primary types of articles a business can write and how to write them, with examples of each.
Seldom do I finish a book without having a few critiques. The rocket ship metaphor used throughout the book seems strained at times, though it works perfectly to demonstrate how content can propel a business into the stratosphere. By the end of the book, I also thought it somewhat misnamed.
If I were to glance at the book in passing at the bookstore, I might think it’s about starting a company in general and not about basing a business marketing strategy on the key activity of generating content to propel the business forward.
Readers of Launch who can put Stelzner’s advice into practice should find it even more effective as a result of Google’s recent commitment to fresh content over stale content. Launch is an eminently practical manifesto and manual to building a business based on publishing great content, attracting interested readers, and converting them—gently and conversationally—into long-term paying customers and raving fans.
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March 29th, 2011 by Collin Canright
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Despite a dramatic shift toward electronic B2B payments and the adoption of preventative techniques, payments fraud has remained persistent.
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John Beran, Comerica’s former chief information officer, sees future payments game changers in social networks, mobile banking and enterprise payments architecture.
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Notes on the “cashless” society. When I was in Amsterdam, cash always worked. U.S. credit and debit card, not so well. Read Chris Skinner’s thoughts.
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March 24th, 2011 by Collin Canright
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Challenge 1: Getting known
Challenge 2: Capital to grow
Challenge 3: Finding and keeping Chicago talent
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A story of the Trapp family lodge (Sound of Music) and its use of social media, with an emphasis on the story writing process.
Tags: B2B marketing, Chicago, economy, innovation
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March 14th, 2011 by Collin Canright
Mobile commerce is still an emerging market in search of itself, with both the boosters and skeptics commenting in recent weeks. The swirl of news and surveys illustrates the tensions between tradition and innovation that mark the new-technology dance of entrepreneur demand creation and consumer desire fulfillment.
A Big, Fat Cloud
In a study that articulates demand for mobile phone payments, Accenture says that 45% of the most active mobile device users would pay for goods and services using their mobile phone. “Mobile commerce—which encompasses mobile banking, such as checking balances or paying bills over a mobile phone, plus coupons, promotions, redeemable gift cards, loyalty points, and more—is poised to drive huge changes in the way we shop and pay for goods and services,” said Andy Zimmerman, Global Managing Director, Accenture Mobility.
At the same time, 73% of the active mobile device users surveyed “expressed significant privacy and identity theft concerns,” according to Zimmerman. Accenture put a good face on the consumer counterpoint of desire and fear, as Zimmerman continued that “While the survey indicates there are issues to address in terms of privacy and security, these findings are good news for mobile network operators because consumers have requirements they look to operators, technology vendors, or financial institutions to address.”
The commercial conundrum within the counterpoint of desire and fear is nicely articulated by Yankee Group analyst Nick Holland, “Every silver lining comes with a big, fat cloud, and the much-hyped and even more anticipated mobile transactions explosion is much the same.” Although usage of mobile devices for payment, commerce, banking, and couponing transactions is increasing, “when consumers are asked to pay for such services, the answer is still a resounding no.”
Upper and Emerging Market Appeals
It appears that mobile banking and payments markets will develop to serve both sides of such oppositions. Mobile banking and digital banking and payments will appeal to both the upper-end U.S. consumer and unbanked emerging-market customer, predicted Citi Chairman Vikram Pandit, speaking at the Feb. 17 meeting of The Executives’ Club of Chicago.
For emerging and unbanked markets, “Mobile banking is a way to address ‘financial exclusion’ and provide greater access to banking to a broader number of people at reduced costs,” Pandit said. For the upper-end consumer, mobile banking provides additional convenience and efficiency to busy lifestyles.
The inevitable and much-needed hype warnings continued on March 1, as Art Gillis, an IT and security consultant specializing in banking, wrote in Bank Technology News:
“Mobile banking, in my opinion, is a little bit of a good thing. The press attention it has received is, in my opinion, over the top. Google Alerts sends me articles daily that were published all over the world with headlines that are hard to believe. Every investor I work for is aware of mobile banking as the hottest new technology, and investors expect it to be the proverbial shot in the arm for bank tech vendors. That’s a little bit like 10% ethanol in my gas tank will solve the global warming problem.”
Mobile is the shot in the arm for any number of organizations battling over ownership of the transactional turf. The Accenture survey, in keeping with its customer base, weighs in on the debate over which kind of organization will profit from mobile payments.
Reports an eMarketer article on the Yankee and Accenture surveys, “Respondents to the Accenture survey expected credit card companies to play a big role in facilitating mobile payments, at 59%. Nearly as many, 54%, thought mobile network operators would help enable mobile payments, and 52% thought software companies like Apple and Google would play a role.”
Apple and Google’s “Me Too” Strategy
I have heard it said, fervently yet naively, that banks and mobile operators ought to watch out for Google and Apple, as they move into payments, both on the web and through mobile access. This shows confusion about the payments mechanisms through the financial system and the payments process at the point of sale.
The artisans at Apple and engineers at Google both have been in the payments news lately, with their announcements of new content payments models. Apple’s has higher fees to content providers while Google’s is considered more of an open and equitable solution, as reported in Information Week.
Writing in the TechCrunch blog, Ohad Samet, payments fraud and risk management expert, provides a cogent commentary on the prospects of Google and Apple in the payments business and why any assumption of their massive success in payments does not take into account the nuances of the business. “Dominating payments requires much more than having the most users with credit cards or a huge take rate on digital content. . . . Creating yet another network based on existing methods is a ‘me too’ strategy that doesn’t provide real incentive for merchants to switch beyond the very specific uses Google and Apple provide today.”
Even so, the continuing focus on payments lies in the ongoing opportunities for innovation and disruption, which Citi’s Pandit believes lies in the vast international population of people without bank accounts and Samet believes lies in disruptive applications for payroll and short-term credit. The market for digital payments remains as vast as the number of traditional analog payments. As the Federal Reserve’s 2010 Payments Survey states, “With 27.5 billion checks still being written, almost half of which are consumer-to-business transactions, much opportunity lies ahead.”
—Collin Canright
collin@canrightcommunications.com
This post was written for the Chicago Payments Information Exchange (CPIX), a group within the Built in Chicago community, serves as a focal point for payments-
related businesses in Chicago, with an emphasis on innovators, news, and trends in payments and banking.
The purpose of the group is to build on Chicago’s history of innovation in payments in order to create greater visibility for this financial-technology market in Chicago. CPIX is moderated by long-time treasury, banking, and payments writer and communications consultant Collin Canright.
Built in Chicago is fast-growing community that serves as a “resource for digital professionals working to build great web and mobile businesses.”
To join Built in Chicago, visit www.builtinchicago.org. For details, read this interview with founder Matt Moog: http://bit.ly/fWrnlp (links to Crain’s Chicago Business’ Enterprise City blog).
To view CPIX group content, visit www.builtinchicago.org/group/payments
Tags: banking, mobile, payments
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December 20th, 2010 by Collin Canright
At the Sibos conference, the banks and software vendors show the latest and greatest technologies and techniques, while SWIFT’s two-year-old innovation initiative, Innotribe, brainstorms the future of finance. Sibos is the annual finance and banking conference sponsored by SWIFT, the Brussels-based organization that provides an international financial communications platform and messaging standards.
This year, the hottest new products and innovation initiatives focused on mobile banking and payments. Speaking at one of the sessions focusing on mobile payments, Diane Reyes, head of global payments for Citi, called mobile banking “one of the common denominators to link the global economy.”
Corporate treasures are interested in the speed of mobile banking, according to an Aite Group study sponsored by Fundtech, the international bank software developer. The study also shows that 65% of companies surveyed are interested in using basic corporate mobile banking services and more than half are interested in using advanced services. (See the full study at www.fundtech.com/mobile.)
Much of the formal discussions centered on how the banking, telecommunications, and funds transfer companies will carve up the market or partner to gain market share. The partnership view seemed to have won out. “My view on mobile payments is it’s an equal partnership with mobile operators, VCs, and technology providers,” Reyes said.
Consumers want fast, global payments that work anywhere and on any system, mobile enthusiasts agreed. “Mobile should be faster than cash,” said Gerhard Romen, director of strategic alliances for Nokia. It will be, but not yet. The frailties of technological development and its as-yet undeveloped international standards led to such ironies as credit and debit cards that would not work in Amsterdam transit ticket dispending machines, while cash Euros obtained from a nearby ATM did.
The SWIFT innovation stream, Innotribe, produced
striking white board renderings from its
open brainstorming sessions throughout
the Sibos conference.
Practical corporate applications of mobile banking are in their initial stages. Daniel Marovitz, head of product management, Global Transaction Banking, Deutsche Bank, noted that his institution sees mobile banking efforts on supply chains where mobile payments are more efficient than physical cash or checks, such as restaurant delivery. “It’s absolutely ripe
for mobile payment and integration with a supply chain
product [because it’s a] more constrained ecosystem where buyer and seller know one another.”
Another banker mentioned that it has been asked to develop mobile payroll payments, while Fundtech demonstrated a mobile application that would allow corporate treasurers who work in the field to approve time-critical payments on their mobile devices in a secure manner. Although not specifically a mobile application, the winner of the SWIFT Innotribe innovation award went to MoneyScope, which received EUR 50,000 to fund development of a cloud-based application that would deliver real-time data to the corporate treasury.
Tags: banking, mobile, payments, Sibos
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December 13th, 2010 by Collin Canright
Standards for payments and reporting tend to ignite passions and controversy, and the Single European Payment Agreement (SEPA) proved the point at the Sibos 2010 conference, held in Amsterdam in late October. European banks, companies, and other interested organizations seek and end-date on SEPA adoption, which thus far has fallen far short of expectations.
While Europe struggles toward a unified payments system, the United States puts what it can into practice, building in compatibility with international standards. The Federal Reserve Banks, for instance, announced its new international ACH payments product and reported in a Sibos session on its initiative to provide extended remittance information in Fedwire transfers.
Implementation of extended remittance information has been delayed a year, to November 19, 2011, so that banks can make the systems changes needed to support the data. Fedwire’s new remittance information is structured using ISO 20022. “We thought the need was unique to the U.S. but are seeing worldwide need for more remittance data in payment structures,” said Lauren Hargraves, senior vice president at the Federal Reserve Banks.
Indeed, the drivers of payments standards and initiatives likely will be large corporations making payments to suppliers around the globe, noted Jeremy Kidd, IT and business manager in the global treasury and insurance section of Cargill, the international food and agricultural concern. Cargill structures its financial information using ISO 20022 so that all data can move through the entire financial chain, from the initial payment through bank account reconciliation.
This “superstructure of information,” as Kidd called it, allows each entity along the way to have access to whatever information it needs for automated processing, without requiring any one entity or supplier to process or accept anything unless they choose to. The exception, however, is that every entity in the financial supply chain must accept and pass through all of the formatted data, whether they need it.
“The biggest problem we face is that some links in the [payments] channel can’t handle all of the information we send,” Kidd said. “With payments to Europe, all of the XML information is lost in the clearing system, so it isn’t available [to receivers] on the other end of the pipe. . . . It only works to its full extent if everyone supports it, and if everyone doesn’t support it, it isn’t a standard.”
Michael Knoor, managing director at Citibank, agreed. “There needs to be structured information transported through a common channel.”
Tags: banking, ISO 20022, payments, SEPA, Sibos
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September 7th, 2010 by Collin Canright
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“Our investment has created a home for thousands of new jobs and has helped shine a national spotlight on Chicago as a technology leader,” [Chicago Mayor Richard M.] Daley said. “The fast-growing technology field is an essential part of our plan to make Chicago the most competitive destination in the world for new businesses and new jobs.” Chicago on the tech move, from Brad Spirrison’s Chicago Sun-Times column
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I’m living in the post-PC revolution. I’m in a desktopless world that is about feeds and profiles running in all my browsers and mobile devices, and interacting in exciting new ways. It doesn’t matter if I am in the office, at home, or at Starbucks—I am productive wherever I am. The enterprise is not just going to the cloud, it’s now going social, and it’s going mobile. Facebook and Twitter have shown us the way. Guest post on TechCrunch by Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff.
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Remember this, though. When you’re reading something here that’s getting you really riled up, stop. It may be that you really should be thinking the exact opposite of what you are. And if you find yourself floating through a post agreeing with all the subtle pandering, wake up! Michael Arrington from TechCrunch
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Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers. Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind . . . William Gibson on Google and Google chief Eric Schmidt’s recent interview.
Tags: Chicago, Social Media, society, technology
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August 31st, 2010 by Collin Canright
March 24th, 2010 by Collin Canright
NOTE: This is a guest post by Dani Nichols, Vice President at North American Polymer Company, Ltd. Dani commented on my post “Journalism Armageddon?” on the Indiana University Alumni LinkedIn Network. It really is a post in and of itself:
I attended this IU networking event last week and found it interesting on many levels. I am not an lawyer (over 50% of that night’s attendees I am guessing) or a journalist, so I was probably one of the few sales and marketing people in attendance that night, which gave me a bit of a different perspective on the whole evening.
From talking to some of the journalists in attendance that night, it’s clear that there’s a lot of fear in the journalism community, and for good reason. What I heard from attendees and the speakers that night is that the future is uncertain, there have been brutal cutbacks in newsrooms for years now and advertising money is slipping away because of the economy.
But I really think that this state of affairs is not driven by bad economic times. The recession has merely sped up the inevitable. Print journalism is in decline, period, and will be all but dead in the next generation or so, especially newspapers.
The speakers were correct that night when they said that it’s darn near impossible to make people start paying for news online when it’s been free all along. We can give examples of exceptions to this rule, namely the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, to point out that stellar journalism can bring subscribers. And these were two examples that were trotted out on a handful of occasions that night. But what other newspapers can we actually name besides these two?
So, what’s really happening from the perspective of an average citizen who happens to not be a journalist? I think I am a pretty good example of the trend. I am 42 years old. I have not subscribed to a daily newspaper since my last subscription to the Indiana Daily Student in 1990.
I get my news from the internet and free sources on my Blackberry, and I occasionally watch the local news on TV at night. I get neighborhood updates by following my alderman on Twitter. I follow news on my congressmen on Facebook. When I am at CVS and see the Sunday (Chicago) Trib, my first thought is “Wow! What a waste of paper.”
How many newspapers do you see lying around the el on the way downtown? In 1992, I used to see a lot of that every day on my way to work. Now? Not so much. How many 20 and 30 year old people do you see with a paper tucked under their arm on the way downtown? Any?
I gave all of these thoughts to two very nice journalists after the talk that night, and I could tell it was uncomfortable to hear, but they agreed it was true. The panelists that night were great, but I wanted them to speak more about the new generation of news consumers (those under 40) and what can be done to get them to pay in the digital arena. They hit on this a wee bit, but kept concentrating too much on how print will survive.
Since I am not in journalism, I don’t have the answers, but I kept thinking “why aren’t they even mentioning the Kindle and the iPad?” To me, it seems like that might be the daily paper’s saving grace in the near future. Buy a subscription and get your daily “paper” delivered right to your Kindle every day, just like the good old fashioned daily paper we used to know and love. And insert all the advertisements to help subsidize it, just like in the past. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are doing it. How’s it going for them? Now that’s what I would have liked to hear more about from the speakers that night.
Now, you may be wondering – do I have a Kindle? No, I do not – yet. But I will when they make them more durable and less expensive. And believe me, they will.
And maybe then I will actually subscribe again to a daily newspaper after a 20 year lapse.
Tags: iPad, journalism, Kindle
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March 19th, 2010 by Collin Canright
Nope. There’s still hope. Lots of it. Along with serious questions. Lots of them.
Closings, layoffs, and bankruptcies are manifestations of current economic chaos. “But in chaos lies opportunity,” said Gerould Kern, editor of The Chicago Tribune, published by Tribune Co.
Joined by Scott Flanders, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, Inc., Kern spoke Thursday March 18 at “A Discussion on Print Media in the Digital Age,” moderated by Bradley J. Hamm, Dean of the IU School of Journalism and jointly sponsored by the journalism school and the IU Maurer School of Law.
If you read media reports and analysis, it sounds like a “crisis” leading to Armageddon, for American democracy as well as journalism, Hamm began. It’s actually more of a business story that the reporters and editors are more interested in than their audiences, Flanders suggested.
“It’s the business model that’s restructuring, not audience consumption,” Flanders said. “There’s an insatiable appetite for information (especially about celebrities).”
As The Economist reported in “Network Effects” (subscription required) on 15 December 2009, “The internet may kill newspapers; but it is not clear if that matters. The news business will survive.” (The story is noteworthy because it reports on a similar time of technological disruption in the media business, with the commercialization of the telegraph in 1845.)
Audience interest remains high. The media and journalism will survive, though not exactly in their current form, Kern and Flanders agreed.
Economic Origins
In Flanders’ analysis, what has brought about much of the current crisis in the newspaper business is the same thing that brought about much of the crisis in much of the economy: too much debt. As with all businesses that are essentially monopolies, the newspaper business was highly profitable for years.
Publishers were underleveraged, in the view of the finance industry, and ripe for increased borrowing. They loaded up on seemingly inexpensive debt. Now they can’t sustain the hits of the recession, and some companies are going bankrupt as a result.
With the recession, the most highly profitable part of a newspaper—classified advertising for cars, jobs, and houses—is way down. So is cash. So are profits. “If craigslist and Angie’s List hadn’t cut out the most profitable part of the business, the classified ads, there would be no problem,” said Flanders, who came to Playboy last June from Irvine, California-based Freedom Communications, Inc.
For a complete view of the media business and audience today, see “State of the News Media 2010,” a study by the Pew Research Center, released 15 March 2010.
Business Model Changes
Now the entire media industry is looking for different business models, and much of the reporting on the media business centers on either the search for a business model or the potential damage to democracy with the demise of high-quality reporting.
Readers have never supported media content in the United States. Advertisers have, and at a higher percentage here than in most other parts of the world, and advertising will not likely ever subsidize American journalism at the same high rates. Online readers in particular will never be willing to pay for content that they now read for free.
What’s also becoming clear is that some readers will pay more than others depending on how they receive content. Both Playboy and The Tribune are looking to the future of mobile information consumption for additional income.
“Mobile users are conditioned to pay for content,” Flanders said. “Mobile is the place where we want to spend the most time and development.” Media companies, the good ones at least, will experiment.
Marketing Journalism
The newspapers that survive will have a “diversity of portfolio,” Kern said, with various properties in print and online. The key will be “super relevant information that people cannot get anywhere else. That will be the value proposition.”
I grew up in a newspaper family, and I saw Lou Grant on TV as the epitome of the hard-bitten editor. I don’t think Lou Grant would use the term “value proposition” or the term it originated from, “unique selling proposition.” I don’t think he would talk like an online marketer, with concerns about whether “content” is “relevant.”
I’m very glad that Kern does. It’s an even better example of things that must change in journalism than either he or Flanders gave in making the point that business deals that seemed inconceivable in the past are happening today. Much of what journalists have considered to be matters of conviction are, in fact, matters of convention, Kern said, and too much convention will lead to extinction.
What also struck me is that one of the answers for media lies in tradition. News organizations must, in Kern’s words, “define what you stand for that’s better than anyone else.”
The most important defining characteristic is the one that keeps my family’s paper, The Chesterton Tribune, in business: local coverage. “The newspapers that survive will not seek to have a national or even a regional force. They will be intensely local,” Kern said.
“Hyperlocal,” to use the term that appears in 2010 media trends reports.
As a reporter covering town meetings, I noticed that it was flooded basements after torrential rains that brought people out to meetings, not so much the everyday business of government. That’s intensely relevant content, Kern agreed.
Media people are intensely interested in public affairs, and it’s a good thing. Many, if not most, people are not.
We’re simply witnessing the latest chapter in the long and ongoing debate over the public interest and the media’s mission to protect it. The level of the public’s interest in public affairs (or public opinion) has always been lower than journalists think it should be. “The narcissism of professional journalism is striking to me,” Flanders remarked.
The Dollars of Sense
Yet Dean Hamm’s question and concern—who will pay for quality journalism?—remains. Early in the week, he attended the New York opening of the play Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers, which included a post-play talkback on the work surrounding the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War. The panel included several of the people involved, including former U.S. Dept. of Defense analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the papers to The New York Times.
It’s clear, Hamm said, that today the Pentagon Papers would be posted on the internet immediately and in full.
But who would make sense of them? The New York Times paid for a team of reporters and lawyers that spent three months reviewing the papers and looking at such questions as national interest, national security, and public information. The Times’ team then digested the results into a long series of articles, fighting—and paying for—a seminal case for press freedom along the way.
Who would do that now? What do you think?
For more on the state of the media business and its economics, see:
“The Cable Wars,” by James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, 19 January 2010.
“Social Reading,” by Collin Canright, Onlines Blog, 27 May 2009.
“Marc Andreessen’s newspaper deathwatch,” Fortune, 4 March 2008.
“End Times,” by Michael Hirschorn, The Atlantic, January/February 2008.
- Collin
Tags: Chicago, Chicago Tribune, Indiana University, journalism, marketing, media, media economics, mobile, New York Times, Playboy
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