My friend Bob just read the book 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive and after sharing with me some promotional ideas the book sparked for him, passed along a link to this blog post, which sums up the whole fascinating list. The book contains some persuasion techniques that you’ll recognize instantly – since they’ve probably been used on you time after time by marketers, sales people and your kids! In any case, there are some great ideas in here for marketers to mull, whether selling newspaper subscriptions, ads or growing audience. From a newspaper perspective, in the face of the raging debate over free versus paid (playing out this week in a grudge match between Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell), it’s interesting to note point six and wonder how it applies (and doesn’t) to that debate: “Giving away the product makes it less desirable.” The whole list is fascinating, but rather than giving in to the temptation to reiterate the whole thing here, I’ll just point out few more highlights: “Labeling people into a social group tends to increase their participation ratio.” Makes sense. Many folks like to feel in the group, and then once they do, feel some obligation to the group. Explains why a cheap T-shirt can actually be a powerful team building device. And how about this bit of good news for the poets in the group – evaluating two nearly identical proverbs, people chose the one that rhymed as the more convincing! The whole list is here.
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Had a really cool experience during one of the 800 meter intervals in tonight’s track workout with the New Hampshire Athletic Alliance. The workout was two 400 meter intervals, four 800 meter intervals, and two 400 meter intervals (with a mile and a half warmup and a mile and half cooldown run). I’d been hitting all the times I’d been aiming for, but not quite halfway through maybe the third 800 meter (half mile) interval, I was feeling ragged, winded, not breathing well. I felt like I was all out and then some – and didn’t expect to be able to hold the pace I was running to the end of the interval. I started trying to focus on the ground and my feet, sort of like I imagine the runners of the Tarahumara tribe do in the book I’m reading (Born to Run, Christopher McDougall – a terrific book which I recommend and will write more about when I finish). I tried to stop fighting the track and start going with it. I started thinking of the ground as welcoming my feet and pushing them along. And immediately I was startled to feel a flow and efficiency come back into my stride that I hadn’t realized had slipped out of it until that moment. And I got my breath back – without slowing down – and ran the second half of the 800 – faster than the first. Now I do believe that running can bring on some spiritual moments, but I’m not suggesting this was metaphysical. This simply reminds me of how much of this (running, life?) is mental, perhaps, or reminds me how the mental and physical are inextrictably intertwined in both running and the rest of life. I suppose this would all be much more obvious to me if I’d done athletics in high school or college, (and I suppose I have often recognized its utility under other names in other arenas in life) but it’s wonderful to be stumbling on it a bit at a time and exploring it as it relates to running now.
Tags: Running, tarahumara
Creative Nerds has a great list of free programs for image editing, drawing, vector art, 3D modeling and animation. With all the drawing the kids and I have been doing lately, these programs fuel my desire for a graphics tablet. I’ve come to hate doing pencil sketches and then scanning…. so much lost in translation. Recommendations welcome.
Tags: 3D modeling, animation, drawing, free, vector art
The newspaper industry is under a tremendous amount of pressure right now, both in terms of cyclical changes — the recession and its direct impact on ad revenues — and longer term challenges such as declining circulation which, while exacerbated by the Internet, was actually a trend that began prior to the Web. Some of this hard news is balanced by good news, such as newspaper companies Web-aided expanding audience and reach, though this has yet to be fully monitized. So it’s no surprise that we’re looking to boost revenues, and in some cases, questioning the wisdom of the free-to-readers, ad-supported model newspaper Web sites have been aiming toward. It’s too complex an issue to solve in this short blog post (ah, wouldn’t that attempt be hubris!), and the solution likely lies in a yet-to-be-negotiated detente between an ad model and certain types of paid content utilizing multiple delivery channels. But in the meantime I wanted to note this piece from Ad Age, which struck me as interesting in that it feels contrarian after all the buzz the “secret” industry paywall meetings and the seeming groundswell of sentiment toward returning to paid sites have been getting.
Photo by Ray via Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/rayphua/
Doesn’t seem long ago that those arguing for the pay wall were wearing the contrarian mantle. It’s also interesting from a cultural, literary and linguistic perspective in that it picks up on a term drawn from Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged and used recently and widely in reference to a segment of the American population that feels it is being unfairly asked to pay for what it perceives to be other peoples’ free rides. If the analogy were borne out, would that make Google the federal government and the newspaper industry the angry taxpayer?
Anyhow, the Ad Age piece takes the side of the argument that that ‘Going Galt‘ (paywalling off content, in this context) is not a good solution for newspapers – that it would in fact backfire. Ken Doctor, from Outsell, is quoted saying: “If you’re those companies [CNN, Huffington Post, etc.], you say, ‘This is our chance to finish those guys off.’ CNN’s not going to put up any pay wall. They don’t need to.” Interesting, but to be entirely true doesn’t it need assume newspapers they don’t produce anything of value that’s unique enough to their markets so that people would miss it enough to pay for it? Doesn’t seem logical, at least in the case of smaller local newspapers (so many of these debates seem to focus exclusively on the economics of big newspaper chains and major metros).
In fact, some of the things Doctor suggests later in the piece that might be charged for seem to be the stock and trade of local newspapers – community information and reports not available anywhere else.
So should newspapers “Go Galt?” I don’t think so – mostly because in recalling my reading Ayn Rand as a high school senior, I don’t think the analogy is entirely appropriate. Should journalists and other folks who work in newspapers get paid for their work. Absolutely, yes. Should readers pay for content directly or by agreeing to view ads in exchange for what they read? Better, more complex question. And not one Ayn Rand is likely to answer for us…
Tags: Ayn Rand, newspapers, paid content
Drawing pictures with the kids this morning – here’s mine. I guess reading the New Yorker’s summer fiction issue this week has got me imitating a certain style here… And no, I haven’t gotten any writing done yet this weekend.
“In times of stress, leaders tend to communicate less about more, when in fact they should be communicating more about less,” according to Deb Titus, from Dale Carnegie, who gave a Webinar at The Telegraph last week. Here are a few tidbits I jotted down during the session, all of which to me seem to apply not only to business and work, but to all our relationships, in which all participants mutually enjoy the opportunity and obligation to demonstrate leadership.
Photo by Desirée Delgado
Communication. Communication should be deliberate, frequent, action-oriented and positively framed. In this way, it’s possible to “inspire the grapevine” rather than trying to silence it. And while during tough times, we clearly need to be intense about what we’re doing, we also need to maintain a tone of patience.
Planning. We need to be adventurous – this doesn’t mean not having a plan, but instead having a plan with flexibility and room for adaptation built into it. From my perspective, this one’s a must-do, because whether you build it in or not, change will be required. People make plans and God laughs.
Conflict. We should avoid arguing, but not avoid conflict. In fact, “Conflict is great – it’s a gift. Until we have it, we don’t know what people are thinking.”
Generosity. We need to be generous with our time, enhance relationships, convey enthusiasm always, and understand that “people will support a world they helped create.”
You can view a video of the Webinar Deb gave here.
Tags: business, leadership, management
If you work in newspapers these days (or book publishing, for that matter!) you probably hear much about the Kindle. Will this device — that provides a non-eye-straining reading, instant wireless purchase of books from Amazon anywhere, anytime — save publishing and the future employment prospects of those us who make our living by the written word? I’m not going to try to answer that here. I’ll just suggest, before getting to my main point, that while I love the feel of genuine leather bound, paper-paged book in my hand, I have serious Kindle envy. Someday.
Anyhow, on to the main point, which is this morning I heard an NPR report that caught my imagination. Bookstores have begun installing a device from On Demand Books called The Espresso Book Machine. The Espresso is a combination printing and binding device that creates a “library quality, perfect-bound paperback book” in just a couple of minutes. That means that even if a bookstore only has a couple of hundred thousand titles on the shelf, you could still walk into one, browse the Espresso, and walk out with a copy of one of millions of books in its database.
Listening to the report, I thought, “Awesome! This is just what I imagined instant books might be like when I was a kid. Very steam-punk meets the Jetsons.” But on the heels of that I felt a twinge of sadness. Because steam-punk and The Jetsons both convey nostalgia. And because to take advantage of the Espresso, I still have to locate and travel to a bookstore where one of these expensive, 800-pound machines lives. It still defies that impulse factor. Whereas, on the Kindle, I hear a book review on NPR, get all fired up about it, reach over, punch a few keys on the Kindle and I own the book.
What this sets up internally for me is the war between my inner bibliophile and my inner reader. I love the tactile feel of books because of the experiences I associate with them, which often comes back to language, though sometimes back to a sense of history, or even childhood physical or emotional memory. This conflict makes me wonder whether the company CEO’s assertion that this device will keep paper books way ahead of electronic books will hold true once e-readers finish penetrating the market the way, say, MP3 players have. Despite being someone who works on the digital side of publishing, part of me hopes so. I genuinely love the written word in its printed form. But at the end of the day, I think my inner bibliophile is a byproduct of the reader, and the delivery mechanism that gives me the most convenient (convenience including all sorts of factors including accessibility, selection, price of content and delivery device and experience) access to the words I want or need to read right now is the one the reader is going to choose. At least most of the time. The same way most people choose MP3s over records, or DVDs over two-hour movies on multiple reels. Or then again, choose reading print magazines in the dentist office instead of lugging a laptop along. Or sometimes choose spreading the Sunday paper out on the kitchen table instead of reading the mobile version on the iPhone. Hmmm… perhaps there’s hope for both formats.
Tags: kindle, on demand books
The question of what’s “fair use” in terms of aggregators indexing and providing lists of stories from newspapers, for example, on their own pages (Google news is good example) is a thorny one, made ever more urgent by news organizations need to grow revenues online more rapidly to offset print declines. Is Google unfairly profiting from the hard work of news gathering organizations by presenting list of headlines and summaries from those news organizations, along with its own ads on Google News pages? Or is it driving traffic and providing free marketing for the newspaper Web sites? Or sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both? This MediaShift story takes a look at the legal action organizations such as the Associated Press (I sit on the New England Associated Press News Executives Association board of directors) have taken against Google. The piece also provides some history regarding this issue – and it’s interesting to see that it predates the Internet:
“In the early 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court was faced with a case in which the AP sought to protect its news content from a rival news organization that traded on the time difference between the publication of AP stories in East Coast newspapers and the later deadlines for West Coast papers. The rival paid off AP employees to pass on early versions of AP stories destined for East Coast papers, rewrote the stories to avoid a copyright claim, and sold the resulting product to West Coast news outlets, thereby taking advantage of AP’s effort and expenditure in gathering the news.” This led to the recognition of ” a limited, “quasi property” right in news content that was distinct from copyright law.”
This weekend was full of family events, including Saturday’s birthday party for Sofia (wow, a troop of 5-year old girls can make some noise!, happy noise, of course), Kris’ mom out for the weekend, planting, a baseball game and a hike today up Mount Uncanoonuc. The kids were abed early, and I’m not far behind them. So rather than write more than another sentence or two… here are a few representative pictures. More on Flickr.
David and Sofia running the bases after the Fisher Cats game.
Isobel posing with the flowers Kris and her mom planted and arranged on the front porch.
The family trooping through what’s become known to us as “the fairy meadow’ near the top of Mount Uncanoonuc.
After spending late winter and early spring running light and recovering from the IT band injury I sustained at Hyannis in February, I raced a first race for the season tonight at the Merrimack Rock N Race in Concord. And while I was about 34 seconds off my 5K PR from last November, the beautiful, summer-like evening, awesome race with live rock bands playing all along the course, Kris and the kids there to cheer on me, my pal Curt running the first couple of miles with me (he kicked it up after mile two and nailed his goal time – awesome!), made it a perfect race to kick off the season.
Before Merrimack Rock N Race 2009
The race is a huge event and goes out from the Statehouse lawn and raises money for Concord Hospital Payson Center for Cancer Care patients– among the dignitaries who spoke at the start was Governor Lynch.
The setting made it an extra special race for me. We lived in downtown Concord when our first two kids were born, and walks for ice cream and to let the kids run around on the lawn were regular summer night events. Seeing David and Sofia (and now Isobel, too!) gamboling around the lawn was pure nostalgia – as was running on streets I ran on so many summer evenings when we lived there. Concord is a great town to see by foot.
The food was also terrific – best post race chow in the state, including grilled chicken and Caesar salads from Outback or hamburgers, or pizza, and plenty of the requisite cookies and baked goods. The bands were good – I especially liked the guys playing Seven Nation Army by The White Stripes about 1.3 miles or so into the race.
In general, it’s good to finally be back off the injured list and running again. And specifically, warm night, running, guitar rock and roll, family and food? Man, what else do you need? (Well, maybe a cold beer later.) Race results are here.
And after...
Tags: 5K, Concord, Merrimack Rock N Race, Running
A couple of Saturdays ago (well, maybe four or five now), I got it into my head to change my Twitter username. Or an idea that had been percolating for a few months about wanting to own my whole name on the service finally coalesced. Or something. In any case, I impulsively changed the name on my account to ernestoburden. Twitter automatically updated my username for all the people following me. So far so good. But about an hour later I got an email notification that someone had commented on my Facebook status. The commenter was wondering if the link in my status update was spam or a hoax, or worse. But I hadn’t posted a status update with a link in it that morning… I checked and saw that the status update was from some sort of service trying to broker my old Twitter name. Within an hour they’d hopped on it, squatted and were now trying to sell it. Worse, updates they posted to it were making their way onto my Facebook page via the Twitter Facebook app. I killed the app and went around the Web updating every social service that I’d associated with my old Twitter account, as well as my blog where I had a hard link to my Twitter account and a widget. This was all especially important to me since in the meantime, Twitter had caught on to the username brokering the squatters were attempting and killed the old username for a couple of different violations of Twitter’s terms of service, leaving a page saying the account had been suspended for suspicious activity. Not something anyone would want a link on any one of my social profiles pointing to!
I spoke to about 60 folks at The Telegraph’s Help 101 event yesterday at Sky Meadow country club (part of the paper’s onlging Hard Times Reasons and Remedies project). My session was Web Marketing 101, and focused on low and no-cost (except time) ways small businesses could approach Web marketing (next we should do one on paid!). Since I only had 45 minutes, we had to go quickly and consolidate a lot of material – but basically we covered in introduction to search, social media and that all important place where the two meet: content. The basic thesis: “The content that will bring people to your site is content that answers their questions about the problem they are trying to solve. So create solution-oriented content, whether in blog posts, YouTube videos, social media updates and pages, etc.” Then I provided some basic easy to take action items to get folks started. The audience was great, energetic and curious; asked good questions. I had interesting discussions with many afterwards – if you were there, thanks for coming by! On a funny note – I also ended up in the lead photo with the story on the event in today’s Telegraph.
Tags: marketing, newspapers, Web, web marketing
I’ve been bad at keeping up on the blog lately, and my mom called me out on it during our Mother’s Day call on Sunday. So here, with the kids abed a few minutes yet before I head there myself, I’m taking a moment to post a cute family blog post from a recent vacation day I took during David’s spring break. Mom, this one’s for you!
This is Isobel dancing up a storm while I play the electronic drum and sound effect wall at the Children’s Museum in Dover. Later David and Sofia became enraptured by the weaving machines (they could both have a serious career in textiles) and David crushed me in Mind Ball. It’s a great little museum. After the museum we went over to Portsmouth for ice cream, French fries (and a martini) afterward. Wonderful day; just the sort I think you would have loved. Can’t wait until you can get up north again to join us!
Tags: children's museum, dancing, David, Isobel, Sofia
Aimed perhaps at iPhone marketing campaigns, iPhone users and, on a meta level, those of us slightly jealous of them (at least when those cool commercials come on)? Oh, and be aware there’s a bit of rough language at the beginning, just in case the kids are in the room with you.
I just finished writing my 100 page (102, really) screenplay in 30 days. So this is going to be a really short blog post. I decided to take on the ScriptFrenzy.org challenge for a number of reasons — none of which had to do with me having free time to kill. In fact, I have less free time right now than I ever have in my life. And that’s probably the main reason I took the challenge. I needed to prove to myself that even with no spare time, I could still squeeze in the fiction writing that has meant so much to me since I was a kid. When I was younger, I used to wait for five-hour stretches of free time to sit down and write. As i got older, those came less and less often, and I wrote less and less often. And at some point I realized I whole months could go by without me writing anything. So I did this challenge, and what I learned is that even writing for a short period of time each night, after work is done, the kids are in bed, the kitchen is cleaned up, I could still get quite a bit of writing done. (C.S. Lewis wrote a huge number of great books in tiny bursts like this…) I could fit it at the expense of nothing more than a half hour of television, or maybe checking my email, or browsing through my RSS feeds one last time in the evening… This is good to know. So good that the knowledge of it makes the effort well worthwhile, even if this screenplay never travels any farther than the digital equivalent of the bottom drawer of my desk.
As a side note, I used the free, Web-based script writing software at http://scripped.com for this project, and recommend it. The formatting commands seem to work best and most consistently in Firefox, tolerably well in IE, and worst in Chrome.
Tags: fiction, screenplay, ScriptFrenzy, writing, writing tools
Kevin Mannion at Media Post offers a good checklist of things Web publishers should know about their audiences when looking to tell the “engagement” story to potential advertisers: ” The more we know about what our audience cares about, why they come to our sites, what they need that they aren’t getting, and how we can help them be successful, the more we have all the raw elements of an extraordinary engagement story.” The list starts with two questions whose primacy should be self evident – though I wonder if it always is: Who comes to your site, and why are they there? Check out the whole list and article here.
Tags: advertising
Many businesses (including and maybe especially media companies!) are beginning to feel like having a Facebook page is a necessary element of a well-rounded Web marketing strategy. However, it’s not always completely clear what strategy the page should employ and what sort of content it should include to really engage with Facebook users. This post from Mashable gives details on these five tactics for creating a good Facebook fan page:
1. Networking with other platforms
2. Creating a resource
3. Create contests that include participation
4. Empower pre-existing pages
5. Target the right demographic
A bit of humor for all of you who, like me, labor in the trenches in the embattled newspaper industry (a battle well-worth fighting for the sake of local journalism, information, the right-to-know and essentially, democracy), here’s Stephen Colbert’s take on newspapers as he sits down with John Sturm of the NAA.
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