Healthy Blog Reviews

Advertising suffers from a reputation problem. Here at Marketing Pilgrim we are very interested in online reputation management but even the best social media monitoring tools can’t help some industries. Of course, when you spend years simply ignoring how poorly you are viewed by the public in general, it doesn’t help. This is how the advertising industry has put together its stellar reputation that it is now trying to control a bit with the help of the oldest journalism school in the country, The University of Missouri School of Journalism. The Huffington Report says Industry leaders are teaming up with the nation’s oldest journalism school to launch the Institute for Advertising Ethics. Among the research center’s goals is to improve the public image of a business that spent $125 billion last year but isn’t exactly known for its bedrock principles and unwavering scruples. Whether it’s the duplicitous exploits of fictional television character Don Draper or the latest penalties levied by the Federal Trade Commission, the ad industry struggles to put its best face forward. A 2007 Gallup survey ranked advertisers among the least trustworthy professionals – barely beating out lobbyists and car salesmen. It’s funny in some ways but actually quite pathetic in many others that the advertising industry has sunk to this level. I would be interested to see that survey conducted today to see if there has been any movement either up or down. I suspect it’s either about the same or even worse but that’s just a guess. So why this desire to self-police? “Because it is persuasion, advertising is viewed in a questionable way by a lot of people,” said Margaret Duffy, a former ad executive who now teaches at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and is helping to organize the ethics institute. But even though the industry’s fundamental purpose is to convince shoppers to buy a product they may not actually need, such persuasion can be done in an “ethical and tasteful” way, she added. Honestly, if this is the attitude of one of the founders of the institute I can only imagine what’s going to come out of it as it develops. Maybe there will be a guide called “How to Make People Buy Things They Don’t Want but Still Feel Good About Your Profession” or how about “Top Ten Ways to Screw Someone Without Them Feeling It”. Sorry I seem a bit negative on this one but when an industry built on spin starts to spin ethics then it’s hard to figure out what is spin and what is, well, something else. This group though is convinced that there is good to be done. The leader of the institute is visiting professor, Wally Snyder, who is a former FTC (Federal Trade Commission) lawyer and American Advertising Federation president. He realizes that he has a tough road ahead with such reputation luminaries as lawyers and members of Congress having higher trust scores than advertisers according to Gallup. That’s pretty impressive, huh?! But if the industry is thinking any way like this following agency owner then all we can say is “Best of luck, Wally!” Mark Fleisher, owner of a small advertising agency in central Pennsylvania near Harrisburg, says the industry doesn’t need to be reminded of the importance of ethical behavior. It just needs to increase the honesty quotient. “The industry has become more ethical because the clients have become smarter,” he said. “Agencies are still going to pull whatever they need to (clinch a deal). And those agencies will run roughshod over the honest ones. That’s been going on for years.” Increase the honesty quotient? Industry has become more ethical because clients have become smarter? I’m not even sure how to respond to those kinds of assessments. Let’s put it this way, if the institute is generating revenue there looks to be plenty of job security in the future. Of course, there will be the ‘big boys’ running the show with board members from Procter & Gamble, Omnicom Group, WPP and Ketchum but as Jim Edwards, a former Adweek managing editor puts it “History does not suggest that these things catch on very well,” he said. “There’s a structural problem in the advertising business. The entire industry is engaged in a race to the bottom. Whoever can do it the cheapest and the fastest wins.” I realize I have taken the cynical approach to this kind of endeavor. What are your thoughts? Is it possible to self-police the ad industry like this group and the Interactive Advertising Bureau are suggesting? Let’s hear your take.

Tags: advertising, clients, congress, country, ethics, federal-trade, institute, marketing, missouri-school, people, Research, simply-ignoring, Social Media, thoughts, university
Posted July 27, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

People who have way too much time on their hands, have done a study to chart the mood swings of the average Twitter user over the course of a week. Stick with me, it gets good-ish. The people running this test come from the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Program on Networked Governance , Harvard University . They used over 300 million tweets that were posted between Sep 2006 – Aug 2009 and they charted them based on geographic location and mood of the tweet. The moods were determined through the use of the ANEW scale from the University of Florida which rates a large number of English words in terms of the emotions they convey. (Still with me?) What the study determined is that there are more happy tweets early in the morning, late in the evening and on weekends. Not surprising when you figure that everything in between those times are traditional working hours, which proves that most people are not happy at their jobs, or at least not happy enough to tweet about it. Sunday mornings are a particularly happy tweet time for people and Thursday evening is rough. I think that’s because all of the best TV shows are scheduled on Thursday nights and it’s frustrating to have to choose. It’s also interesting to note that West Coast moods generally follow East Coast moods with a delay of. . . you guessed it. . three hours. While this data is intriguing and the chart they made is fun to look at , there really is some information here that you can use. If you’re running a Twitter campaign, schedule your tweets to hit before noon and after seven in the evening but be wary of time zones. Sending tweets from the NY office at six will land at the ultimate low tide for Twitter users in Los Angeles. There is an exception to this rule. You may want to send your tweets in the middle of the day if you’re selling something that depends on a negative mood such as an ebook on quitting your job or 101 Ways to Get Revenge After Being Dumped. What do you think? Can timed tweets effect the results of your Twitter marketing campaign? Or is one tweet time as good as any other?

Tags: data, flickr, Florida, mood, over-the-course, Research, science, Social, social-science, study, through-the-use, Twitter, university
Posted July 23, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Well, maybe this signals the beginning of the end. Maybe this is the sign of the end times. Maybe, just maybe, there is a chance that things like losing deals happen for Google just like, gulp, the rest of the business world. Despite big wins in the past year like the city of Los Angeles moving to Google Apps for e-mail and more it appears that Google is not just gonna steamroll their way into enterprise accounts normally reserved for Microsoft. Mashable reports The University of California – Davis has stopped using Gmail for its 30,000-member staff and faculty body. The university was trying Gmail for faculty and staff with plans to roll out service to the entire campus. But school officials say this email system isn’t secure or private enough to meet their standards. CIO Peter Siegel, Academic Senate IT chair Niels Jensen and Campus Council IT chair Joe Kiskis said the plug was pulled on Gmail because faculty were concerned that Google’s services wouldn’t keep their correspondence private enough. Many privacy experts also say that Gmail’s social component, Google Buzz, is the source of privacy and security vulnerabilities. Ouch. That’s gonna bruise. If Google Buzz was indeed one of the reasons for a 30,000 seat deal going down the crapper then treating everyone’s privacy like it didn’t exist may hurt Google where it really hurts: in the wallet. Apparently this is not the first time that security concerns from a prominent institution of higher learning has put the brakes on “going Google”. About a month ago, Yale University made a similar decision. Yale’s concerns centered around security issues, technological risks and the way Google manages data in the cloud. It’s interesting that big city governments like LA and Washington, DC have gone with Google no problem. Wonder how the Google Buzz privacy debacle went over in those accounts? Well, maybe Google’s products aren’t what they claim to be since they appear to be just “close enough for government work”.

Tags: academic-senate, Business, California, campus-council, correspondence, google-buzz, more-it-appears, Peter Siegel, source, university
Posted May 6, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

The University of Maryland’s International Center for Media and the Public Agenda conducted a study of college students, depriving them of the Internet, cell phones, and even TV, newspapers and radio for twenty-four hours. Based on the students’ own comments about how much they missed it and were addicted to the Internet, the researchers concluded that the results of one single day were college students are Internetaholics . Oh, I’m so addicted to hyperbole. Feeling dependent on something doesn’t make you actually dependent on it. The students were unwilling to go without media, disliked the experience and claimed to be dependent on and addicted to the Internet and other media—but we’re still a bit short of calling this game. Now, let me say this: the Internet/media may be an addiction. (And I hereby volunteer myself as a prime candidate for a study on that!) However, this study doesn’t do anything to convince me of that. My cell phone has been in the shop for three hours as I write this, and I feel physically disconnected—like I’ve had my antennae clipped. If I had antennae, you know. But that statement does not a scientific or even significant breakthrough make. There are specific chemical centers and reactions and behaviors in the brain that constitute an actual addiction. Until we’re ready to look at something a bit more scientifically, using the term “addiction”—an actual, scientific term—is premature. For the real meat: “students felt most bereft without their cell phones,” says the study’s website . Obviously, these were the devices they used the most to contact their friends and family. Hm… so was it the cell phones, or the friends and family members they couldn’t contact quickly that they missed the most? The quotes they used from the students indicated that the utility of cell phones and social networks were what the students missed most—everything from calling their mom, to planning to meet friends, to taking notes in class, to checking the time. So yes, mobile devices and social networks have become pervasive and well-used—but we’re still using them to do the same things and connect with individuals more efficiently. Bottom line: college students use media a lot. It’s faster and easier—and yes, very deeply ingrained into the way they do things. But nobody actually broke out in a cold sweat over losing their Samsung. Mercifully, the study was short enough that the participants probably suffered few long-term effects, if any . What do you think? Is this a case of exaggeration of the findings? via

Tags: cell-phones, cloud-hosting, friends, game, internet, internetaholics, media, students, study, university
Posted April 26, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

We have heard this song sung by News Corps Rupert Murdoch on many occasions. If consistency counts for anything he certainly gets point for staying on message. Murdoch has again opened up his war of words around paywalls for online newspaper content and calling Google on copyright infringement. This time, though, Mr. Murdoch was able to show that at least he is hip to what is going on in the world of technology by talking about Apple’s iPad as well. Murdoch was speaking at a National Press Club event at George Washington University and the Guardian reports Rupert Murdoch has launched a spirited defence of putting up paywalls around his newspaper websites, while embracing the game-changing potential of Apple’s iPad. The News Corp chairman hailed the new device as a possible saviour of the newspaper industry. Murdoch renewed his attacks on search engines, such as Google, whom he accused of stealing journalism from traditional media outlets. He said the newspaper industry had to stand up for itself and charge for content while using copyright law to defend its journalism from being used without its permission. So Murdoch is carrying through with his threat to set up paywalls when he does so for the Times and Sunday Times of London in June. What he needs, however, is the support of the rest of the industry. In his remarks it sounded, however, that the rest of the newspaper industry may not “have his back” on this. Needless to say, Murdoch is not happy and pointed the New York Times out as one of the problem spots in the paywall line of defense. Murdoch also fired a shot at the New York Times – a common bête noire of Murdoch’s and the Journal’s main rival – by saying that the New York Times’ own paywall plans were half-hearted and needed to be more restrictive. They don’t seem to be able to make up their mind. They will have opposition internally from some of their journalists, especially their columnists,” he said.”To really make it work they have got to put a paywall up. I think most newspapers in [the US] have got to have a paywall. The likelihood of all newspapers suddenly getting up one morning and saying as they read their own newspaper online “Gee, I think Rupert is right and today is the day to tell our readership they are screwed unless they cough up a fee” is slim. In fact, some of the experiments with paywalls have left something to be desired. Murdoch did, however, show off his hipster coolness by showing the WSJ iPad version and he even pulled out his crystal ball. I got a glimpse of the future last weekend with the Apple iPad. It is a wonderful thing,” he said. “If you have less newspapers and more of these… it may well be the saving of the newspaper industry Now all he has to do is find the 300,000 initial buyers (total sales figures for the iPad since the “opening day” are not readily available) and convince them that they need to pay for all of his newspapers so they can be read on their iPads. Unfortunately, I would have to guess that many of these iPad owners aren’t exactly the WSJ crowd so he may want to lay off the savior talk for the short term. So we ask, yet again, are there ANY newspapers that you are willing to pay for online? Is there content from one source that you require so specifically that you are willing to pay for it? Let us know. Maybe your answers will help the newspaper folks to move closer to or further away from Murdoch’s call to arms. Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Tags: answers, Apple, hipster, industry, journal, London, mind, Murdoch, newspapers, the-newspaper, time, university
Posted April 7, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media