Regarding my previous post about Oreo’s Real Time Advertising, here’s interesting debate among industry experts on the topic. Gathered at the Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) to enforce a few home truths about the real-time bidding market. The Drum’s has rounded up some of the key themes and main points from the event. Check it out and read my insights below.

Check out the video about Real Time Advertising and bidding:

$FB is still stuck at $26.25, way down from its $38 IPO price, but it’s made important progress since going public a year ago. Daily users up 26%, mobile monthly users up 56%, and revenue up 38% are some highlights.

See on techcrunch.com

One of the best ads during the Super Bowl yesterday didn’t exist until well after the game started–and didn’t even run on television. It was Oreo’s ad, which was embedded in a tweet made during the half-hour blackout in the third quarter.

See on www.forbes.com

According to Global Web Index research, Google+ has continued to grow rapidly, and now, just 1,5 years later, Google+ says to be the second largest social network in the world, with 343 million active users. Whow!! Everyone goes bananas. What a success! Despite Google’s advantage of having a wide range of other services as basis, it’s a heavy growth. No doubt about it.

But are we still in the numbers game? Users? I remember when a user had a commercial value, no matter what. But these days, when we know so much better? “Active user”? Global Web Index defined “active user” as someone who used or contributed to the network in the past month(!) From my perspective it’s not even “a user”, is it?

Less than a year ago, when Google’s CEO, Larry Page, announced that Google Plus had passed over the 100 million users, RJMetrics suspected that the growth was “fueled by Google forcing membership upon users of its other products”, with a very poor engagement as a result.

To find out, they pulled publicly available data on a random population into their online dashboard and got it confirmed that the users engagement was very poor.

Some of their key findings was:

• The average post has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share.
• 30% of users who make a public post never make a second one. Even after making five public posts, there is a 15% chance that a user will not post publicly again.
• Among users who make publicly-viewable posts, there is an average of 12 days between each post
• A cohort analysis reveals that, after a member makes a public post, the average number of public posts they make in each subsequent month declines steadily. This trend is not improving in newer cohorts.
• Todd Wasserman wrote an article about the findings for Mashable: “Google+ Engagement Still Way Behind Facebook, Twitter” and added that, in contrast, a the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 52% of Facebook users and 33% of Twitter users engage with the platform daily.

The RJ Metrics report emerges after comScore found that Google+ users spent an average of 3.3 minutes on the site in January vs. 7.5 hours for Facebook.

An inconvenient truth for Google+ that also became the chart of the day for Silicon Alley Insider.

Well – that’s a year ago, but I haven’t seen any indicators that the engagement has increased. Have you?

Business leaders, If you would like your business to be one of the premier institutions – the crown jewels – in its industry; if you would like your business to be widely admired by knowledgeable business people; if you would like your business to make an indelible imprint on the world in which we all live – a sustainable business year after year – stop striving to make a profit as if it would be the purpose of your business.

If the purpose of a business is to make a profit. And the purpose of PR efforts is to generate leads and sales – you will fail.

Visionary companies - the best of the best in their industries

After six years of research, Jim Collins, the author of “Build to last”, found out that the common themes of what he call “the visionary companies” is that they all have got a “visionary framework”. He has chosen the term “visionary companies”, rather than just “successful” or “enduring” companies, to reflect the fact that they have distinguished themselves as a very special and elite breed of institutions. They are more than successful. They are more than enduring. In most cases, they are the best of the best in their industries, and have been that way for decades.

The purpose of their business is not to make profit

The key elements of the visionary framework are core values and core purpose. Values – the essential and enduring tenets of an organization, a small set of timeless guiding principles. And Purpose – the organization’s reason for being; the soul of the organization. Elements that never changes.

The purpose of a visionary company is not to make a profit. Visionary companies strive to provide value, change things for the better, solve problems and meet needs.

A few quotes from people mentioned in the book:

John Young, former CEO, Hewlett-Packard, 1992 said: “…profit – as important as it is – is not why the Hewlett-Packard exists; it exists for more fundamental reasons.”

In Merck & Company’s, Internal management guide, 1989, it’s written: “We are in the business of preserving and improving human life. All of our actions must be measured by our success in achieving this goal.”

And Don Petersen, former CEO, Ford, said 1994: “Putting profits after people and products was magical at Ford.”

The purpose of your PR efforts shouldn’t be t to generate sales leads

I believe this applies to your PR efforts as well. Unfortunately, we’re now drowning in posts that’s all about how to generate sales leads as a result of our PR efforts.

Ian Cleary (PR Daily) invited us earlier this month to “Convert Facebook fans to customers…” He said: “It’s easy to get caught up with the number of fans you have on Facebook, but we’re in the business of selling our products and services. Your time spent on Facebook needs to be rewarded.”

No, we PR practitioners are not in “the business of selling”. We are in the business of serving our community.

A year ago I read another article by Mike Santoro, President for Walker Sands: “8 Ways To Measure Return On PR Investments”, where Mike says: “Good PR [...] driving leads to your door. When your company prioritizes strategic placements in trade and consumer publications, your sales organization will inevitably experience a bump in the area of inbound leads.”
And furthermore:  “A robust PR strategy should substantially shorten the length of your organization’s sales cycle. In general, the use of thought-leadership materials and media placements reduces sales cycles by 10% or more–creating efficiencies that can be leveraged to increase the volume of prospects and leads that are managed by your existing sales team.”

From my perspective, a great side effect, but hopefully not the goal, nor the purpose.

The Council of Public Relations Firms in U.S made a statement in a post by Tim Marklein that “Money matters: Rethinking ROI for Public Relations”.

The Council had earlier that year “established a new measurement committee to help drive development and adoption of industry standards for public relations measurement” which argue “for a strict definition of ROI for public relations focused purely on financial calculations of return against investment.” And the committee argues for that a “strict “money in, money out” definition is critical for public relations leaders to embrace if they are to maintain credibility in the executive suite and boardroom.”

Don’t do that. Please, stick to your mission instead and fulfill the real purpose with your PR efforts.

Because, as another blogger said: “…  it is not a matter of selling campaign, the role is more structural to bring confidence from the reader to the informer.” Or as Alison Theaker explains in his book the Public Relations Handbook: “Public Relations is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and understanding between an organisation and its publics.” Period!

Meghan Peters wrote an very interesting post “The Future of Community Management” for Mashable, relating to the same topic. He refers to Kathy Sierra, a programming instructor and game developer, presentation “Building the Minimum Badass User“, in which she said:

“People don’t buy your product because they like the product; they buy your product because they like themselves”. And Sierra argues that “this is the brand-user disconnect: Community managers want users to think the brand is awesome — but users want to be awesome.”

Like Mashable’s Meghan Peters, who urges his reader to “focus on a vested community”, I strongly recommend you to serve the people your are there for; the people who are the reason for why your business exist. Period! Money will follow.

As you all know, in journalism, crowdsourcing use to be the collaboration between a journalist (media) and a bunch of people (a crowd) who’s involved and engaged in the same topics that the journalist is working on. Or as Jeff Howe defined the term in general in the article “the Rise of Crowdsourcing” for Wired Magazine, back in June 2006:

“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated employee and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

But does crowdsourcing really work? Oh yes, if you’ve got the crowd’s attention and cooperativeness, it can help you in a way you couldn’t even dream of.

A popular example of crowdsourcing is how contestants were using the audience in order to answer correctly to questions, in that TV show “Who want’s to be a millionaire”. Co-founder of Rubber Republic, Chris Quigley, wrote about the phenomena in a blog post a couple of years ago. He got the inspiration from the book “The Smart Swarm: How to Work Efficiently, Communicate Effectively, and Make Better Decisions Using the Secrets of Flocks, Schools, and Colonies” by Peter Miller.

Chris says that “the book looks at how humans can learn from the collective intelligent behaviour of animals – in particular, how we can learn from animals (like bees and termites) swarm behaviour: i.e. how they manage to self-organise in such huge numbers”.

The bit Chris found particularly interesting was the discussion around harnessing the wisdom of the crowds; the fact that the crowd is more intelligent than the individual.

So when it comes to the show “Who wants to be a millionaire” it became quite obvious that you should use the audience in order to get the right answers. The audience was correct 91% of the time, unlike the experts who did it right only 65% of the time.

Another great example is the classic anecdote from the book “The wisdom of crowds” by James Surowiecki where “eight hundred people participated in a contest to estimate the weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox, at a country fair in Plymouth, 1906. And the mean of all eight hundred guesses, at 1197 pounds, was closer than any of the individual guesses (among them experts) to the true weight of 1198 pounds.

And if your convert this into journalism, check out this “advert for the Guardian’s open journalism, screened for the first time on 29 February 2012, imagines how we might cover the story of the three little pigs in print and online. Follow the story from the paper’s front page headline, through a social media discussion and finally to an unexpected conclusion”.

But “not all crowds (groups) are wise, like for an example mobs”. According to Surowiecki, four key criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:

1. Diversity of opinion – Each person should have private information even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
2. Independence – People’s opinions aren’t determined by the opinions of those around them.
3. Decentralization – People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
4. Aggregation – Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

I doubt that the “corporate staff” meets all of these criteria, but it doesn’t really matters, as long as journalists don’t expect the truth and nothing but the truth from these people. But rather look at “the corporate staff” as a source who can shed some light over things they didn’t know and/or understood.

Mind you, I’m not talking about journalists ability to send requests to a group of PR-pros, like they can do on “Help a Reporter”, “Responce Source”, among others. With all respect for Peter Shankman’s and Daryl Willcox great services, but I’m talking about Surowiecki’s last mentioned criteria; the overall mechanism for “turning individual judgments into a collective decision”. I’m talking about all those mutual and collaborative processes beyond boundaries, between journalists and all kind of employees and corporate representatives from all kind of companies and organizations, resulting in reasonable basis for decisions, and further research.

I call it “corpsourcing” and – yes – that’s just an expression I recently came up with So don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it before, but do worry a little bit if you’re not being a part of that movement in the near future.

The Statista “Chart of the Day” currently focuses on two sectors: “Media and Technology”, updated daily and featuring the latest statistics from the media, internet, telecommunications and consumer electronics industries in United States. Felix Richter, at Statista, showed us a few days ago what he thought was the “chart of the day”, which shows Google’s advertising revenue since 2004 compared to print ad revenues of U.S. newspapers and magazines.

As you can see, over the past few years, online ads have quickly grown past newspaper and magazine advertising to become the second largest ad medium behind television.

You will find more statistics at Statista

Felix says:

“We have played with the numbers a little bit and found an interesting piece of information that nicely illustrates how ad markets have changed in the past decade: in the first six months of 2012, Google raked in $20.8 billion in ad revenue, while the whole U.S. print media (newspapers and magazines) generated $19.2 billion from print advertising. That is, Google, a company founded 14 years ago, makes more money from advertising than an industry that has been around for more than a hundred years. Given the fact that Google operates globally, the comparison is obviously unfair and shouldn’t be judged scientifically, but nonetheless it shows how big Google’s ad business really is and how small print advertising has become.”

Not long time ago I wrote the post “Newspaper industry back to where it was in 1950” in which I referred to Newspapers Association of Americas chart of the declining newspaper advertising revenue stream since 1950. Compared to the Google significantly increased revenue since they took off, it’s nothing but a huge paradigm shift. Exciting future ahead!

You will find more statistics at Statista

Thank you for the tips, Erik Hörnfeldt, member of “Journalistbubblan” at Facebook.

I recently read a post by Denis Pinsky in Forbes who says “Why journalists should care about Google author rank…”. And that applies for PR pros as well. Because when it comes to PR, I use to say that content isn’t king – but you might be. Chris Brogan wrote a post in question years ago, in which he says: “Content is currency. You’re the king.” And that’s exactly what the Google team has known for years. And that’s the basis for Google Author Rank as well.

We are all aware of that the authors and their content creation lives in symbiosis. But still, I would like to make a point of that content is nothing but an extension of people themselves. I want to emphasize how important it is to be someone before one start express oneself. It’s like… “I hear what you’re saying, but who are you, really? Can I trust you?”

When you’re looking for information, you don’t just want information? You want information from authors you know and/or you can trust. You want them both. And that’s what Google Author Rank is about.

Content vs author has been a hot topic for quite a while. As you know, Google’s “page rank” is an absolutely outstanding algorithm to provide you with relevant information that matters. The authors have been secondary – so far.

But a couple of years ago Google began to highlight content creators in search results. Why? Because they realized that the authorship is a great way to identify and highlight high-quality content. Plus, the web is centered around people. People discovering content on the web often want to learn more about its author, see other content by that author, and even interact with the author”.

Google says in a blog post:
“Many of you create great content on the web, and we work hard to make that content discoverable on Google. Today (6/28/11) we will start highlighting the people creating this content in Google.com search results.

Google started to support authorship markup for web search – “a way to connect authors with their content on the web.”

Google says: “We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.”

Even the Google Panda algorithm takes into account who’s been the author; if an article is written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?

This is of course among other things a result of an evolution of the social web. A web powered by social media features of all kind, where anyone can be some kind of an author.

But Google has never really succeeded to supply the market with such a features and services. Google buzz failed. Google Wave failed. But Google+ seems to be an successful exception. And with Google+, the Google social search became a reality as “Google Plus Your World” – content from people you know – remember?

The 10th of January this year Google wrote in its official blog:
“Google Search has always been about finding the best results for you. Sometimes that means results from the public web, but sometimes it means your personal content or things shared with you by people you care about. These wonderful people and this rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience. Search is still limited to a universe of web pages created publicly, mostly by people you’ve never met. Today we’re changing that by bringing your world, rich with people and information, into search.”

Google was trying to transform “Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships” and addes three new features:

1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community.

Now – Google has taken the search experience to the next level. And I’m not talking about Google Knowledge graph (which is an amazing part of the search by the way) but Google Author Rank.

Google Author rank “means your reputation as a content creator will directly influence your page rank within Google search results. Each content provider will have their work graded, and it’s these grades that Google will use as information about how useful one’s content is within the big Google engine”, explains Pinsky the Google efforts in Forbes, and continues:

“One of the primary issues with the inherent way that search engines currently operate is that they are heavily reliant on links. In theory this would show that the site is offering valued content that other people highly rate. The problem is that links can be manipulated via various linking schemes, so low-quality content can get high-ranked positions in results. Author Rank however gives Google another powerful variable in making sure that only the most respected and authoritarian content on any given subject rises to the top of Google. Author Rank will also work on individual topics, meaning an author may rank very low in certain topics, but very high in others.”

So if you’re a PR pro, you should consider Google’s over 200 ranking factors which determines how you as a content creator will be ranked in organic search. Check out Mike Arnesen’s factors that Google likely to use in their calculation:

• The average PageRank of an author’s content.
• The average number of +1s and Google+ shares the author’s content receives.
• The number of Google+ circles an author is in.
• Reciprocal connections to other high AuthorRank authors.
• The number and authority of sites an author’s content has been published to.
• The engagement level of an author’s native Google+ content (i.e., posts to Google+).
• The level of on-site engagement for an author’s content (i.e., comments and author’s responses to comments)
• Outside authority indicators (e.g., the presence of a Wikipedia page).
• YouTube subscribers and/or engagement on authored videos (speculation: multiple-attribution author markup for YouTube videos coming soon).
• Any number of importance/authority metrics on social networks that Google deems trustworthy enough (Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, SlideShare, etc.).
• Real world authority indicators like published works on Google Books or Google Scholar.

Pr Consultant Stephen Waddington has realized that, wrote a blog post about it and refers to a great explanation of Google Author rank by James Carson (Bauer Media) at Brighton SEO in April 2012:

To be an author from Google Author Rank perspective, you must implement the “rel=“author” markup code” into your “media” (blog what ever). And look what happened to my post after I did:

Well, I realize this is a personalization of my search result, but still… Implement you mark up code, and be a great author even from Googles perspective. Follow Kevin Getch instructions in his post “How to Implement rel=“author” for Enhanced Search Results”.

OPA produce research into online advertising and media consumption with the goal of advancing the online publishing industry, where the Internet Activity Index is a new way of looking at consumer engagement online.

This six-year analysis of the Internet Activity Index is a monthly gauge of the time being spent with:

• Content (Sites like NYTimes.com, ESPN.com and Edmunds.com (Content sites)
• Communications (websites offering email, and Instant messaging)
• Community (Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn)
• Commerce (such as Ebay, Amazon)
• Search (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc)

In his blog post, Jeff Bullas came up with five key findings from the study:

1. Internet users continue to spend a majority of their “time” with Content sites, up from 34 percent of total time spent in 2003 to 42 percent in 2009, a 24 percent increase
2. Emergence of Community (it wasn’t measured in 2003 as it wasn’t statistically significant enough and not on the radar)
3. Content is still king; the content rich sites continue to be a place where consumers spend the majority of their online time and provide an environment for brand marketers to reach and engage with consumers despite the emergence of  community sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace
4. Community sites are reducing the share of online time by communications sites due to community sites ability to offer the same activities such as email and instant messaging more efficiently
5. Time spent with Search doubled

This is of course good news for both Jeff and me, who are working with content marketing and PR. I guess that’s one of the reasons for why we are so committed to this topic. And it doesn’t surprise me that Jeff’s key take away is the importance to optimize and utilize content for social media. I completely agree.

But I would add a couple of reflections in this matter.

First, I believe there’s too much talk about the importance of great content, for the benefit of being remarkable by organisations themselves. I know Jeff are very much aware of being great is the basis of great content. But still, I’ve seen so many bad practices of organisations which aren’t. And that’s not only a bad idea, it might be devastating. From my perspective, I believe organisations should focus more of being “remarkable”, as Seth Godins says in his book “Purple Cow”. “Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service.”

Second; what’s the difference between “content sites” and “communities” these days really? I mean isn’t Facebook all about content? What about Pinterst, Tumblr, and other content curation social sites, are these content sites or communities? Probably both?
No, NYTimes is not a community – yet. But Mashable might be… almost, when they launched Mashable Follow – their new “social layer”? However, most of the content these days is published in some kind of social context. And most of todays news items are the basis for discussions.

Furthermore; if community sites are reducing the share of online time by communications sites due to community sites ability to offer the same activities, then we’re not spending less time to communicate, we just do it with new kind of communication sites, don’t we? It’s just a merge. Like the merge of Social and Search, right?
When we’re looking for solutions on our problems, we do search for them, on social networks as well as on the web? Or both on the same time… social search e.g Google Search – Plus your world.

Yes – this is all about U.S so far. U.S papers have obviously taken the first hit. Many newspapers have been knocked out over there. And more will follow. But I guess the rest of the international paper industry will follow. In U.S the print advertising revenue fell by $2.1 billion in 2011. The newspaper industry are only worth about $34 billion yearly, down from $59 billion in 2000.

Check out the discussion in this matter in Inside Story between Clay Shirky – professor at interactive telecoms dept in NYU, Andrea Stone at Huffington post and Paul Farhi, media reporter for The Washington Post.