"All the news that fits" indeed. Rolling Stone magazine has announced that it is giving up its over-sized format for a more conventional 8 x 11 size in October.

“Sadly, Rolling Stone stopped being Rolling Stone, a long time ago. I was a near charter subscriber to the Stone and watched its Gibbon's-like fall into ruin and ashes with dismay and anger ineluctably morphing into the 20th century's great disease: apathy.”

On the other hand, you have to admire Jann Wenner’s bravado-and staying power. There’s a reason Rolling Stone continues to thrive as a business, instead of being some kind of historic relic of the hey day of Haight-Ashbury (which the original long abandoned RS culture that Gary rightly mourns actually is). Wenner’s always followed the money, and in that sense he’s always been more attuned to the self-centred, coolly calculating Boomer generation than that cohort with its mythical peace, love and freedom rep would like to admit. This quote from the New York Times piece this week about the change says it all: “All you’re getting from that large size is nostalgia.”

The Times reports that Rolling Stone’s current 1.4 million paid circulation is the highest in its history. But newsstand single copy sales, always a key barometer of publishing buzz, have tumbled from 189,000 in 1999, to 132,000 last year. “Magazine racks at bookstores, newsstands and checkout counters tend to be made for the standard dimensions, and if Rolling Stone is there, it is often on a high or low shelf, out of eye level, or even on its side or folded over.” This aims to fix all that.

By the way, the latest data on Canadian magazine newsstand circulations, also out this week, are fairly distressing. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulation, single copy newsstand sales are down a precipitous 22.3% this year over last, with total circ down 6.3%. There are methodology nuances that might be at play here, but this is yet more hard evidence of which way the wind is blowing. And, to paraphrase another iconic voice from the 60s, you don’t need a weather man to tell you that.

But in case you do, Bruce Claassen, chairman of Aegis Media Canada, and CEO, Genesis-Vizeum Inc., told Marketing Daily the other day that a single year drop like this is “in and of itself is not something for publishers to get alarmed about,” but...

“Consumers are much more comfortable reading digital products than they once were and publishers need to find a way to both track those readership numbers and generate revenue from online content. The big challenge for publishers is how do we work on multiple platforms and how do we monetize that content.”

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 2:20 PM EDT

Updated: Wednesday, 13 August 2008 2:32 PM EDT

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Word of mouth or viral marketing has always been with us, although it clearly has been given a massive boost in the Web era. When everyone can tell everyone about anything instantly, the ability of an organization to hide from –or ignore- word of mouth (WOM) is greatly reduced. On the plus side, the opportunities to amplify positive buzz are also enormous. Either way, it all means the best way to operate now is to be pretty darn good, and empower everyone in the organization to put their best foot forward.

WestJet VP of Culture and Communications Richard Bartrem crystalized this for me at the Canadian Marketing Association’s Mass to Grass World of Mouth Marketing Conference at Ontario Place last month. In his talk, “Caring Owners: Driving Word of Mouth through Employee Empowerment and Engagement” Bartrem came off like a West Wing character: one of those handsome and fast talking, but witty and smart, people dedicated to doing good in a tough, but ultimately collegial environment filled with other fast talking, smart, caring people.

Okay, I admit I’ve been spending too much time with the full season box sets of Aaron Sorkin’s great TV series about life in the White House lately (it truly is a great primer on public policy, politics and issues management-and still relevant nine years after the first episodes aired). By even making the comparison here I’m playing into Bartrem’s and WestJet’s evil WOM propaganda plan. But if the shoe fits... The talk rang true with my perception of the WestJet culture, and there’s no question that it really set the tone for the whole Mass-to-Grass day - not a presenter or panelist on after him that I saw didn’t reference his comments glowingly.

The key to successful manufacturing positive WOM Bartrem said is to distinguish yourself to be a story worth telling. Logistics and channels etc. are all secondary to having something to say. “We can’t make you speak, but we hope we’ll make you want to speak.”

And Bartrem and WestJet clearly believe that stories worth telling happen when front line staff is “empowered to do things beyond expectations.” That might include having staff dressed up as Elvis greeting passengers on the first day of service to Los Vegas, giving check-in employees the discretion to waive excess baggage fees when they see fit to regularly allowing “guests” to propose over the in-flight intercom (432 engagements on planes as of June 11).  

It doesn’t hurt that WestJet has as its primary competitor a company that consumers have extremely low expectations of (expectations that are regularly confirmed). But WestJet does have an obviously funky, informal culture. Bartrem characterized it as being simultaneously “loose and tight:” tight on take off and safety procedures, but loose on the other stuff.

One area WestJet pays careful attention to is language. Staff are “Westjetters” not “employees.” It has “team leaders” rather than “supervisors,” “passengers” are “guests” (and definitely not depersonalized acronyms like “PAX” or “COWS” as is common with U.S. carriers) and instead of “polices” the company has “promises. (This might be called corporate speak, as per my last post, but it is notable-and I think laudable- that this approach to language is about jettisoning jargon for clearer, simpler –and yes kinder and gentler- verbiage.)

But WOM all comes down to having stories to tell. At Mass-to-grass Bartrem told the story of the autistic kid who got kicked off an Air Canada flight out of Moncton but who WestJet found a way to accommodate to illustrate the bottom-up “promises” vs. the top-down “polices” approaches to employee engagement.

The child was upset and nervous and apparently couldn’t be calmed down. After a short time Air Canada made the call that the child wouldn’t be able to take the flight. The mother walked over to the WestJet gate, explained the story and the airline immediately started to work to find a way to make it happen. The child and parent were boarded first and given more than a half hour to acclimatize to the plane, which included getting to spend some time in the cockpit. It ultimately meant a 45-minute delay in take off, but all the passengers were told why. Naturally, the incident made it to the press –and naturally, WestJet came off looking better than Air Canada.

“This where stories happen,” he said and “136 people on the plane can tell the story.”

And Bartrem can also tell it -again and again- at industry conferences.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 2:23 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 7 July 2008 2:29 PM EDT

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This is humbling.

I like to think of myself as being a pretty good writer, but novelist and Globe and Mail columnist Russell Smith has pricked my inner writer’s self-conscious paranoia with his smart column today on corporatespeak, or “crapspeak” as he puts it.

Even the headline “Going forward, rise up against crapspeak” leaves a mark. I’ve found myself using the “going forward” phrase often, and a few of the other offending turns of phrase Smith rants about.

Impassioned treatises about how business and political leaders pervert language to disguise their true meanings rather than to clarify their intent, come along every few weeks. And they go back decades if not centuries. George Orwell was writing about “double speak” in the 1940s, and the “big lie” was perfected (and decried) by totalitarian regimes in the 20s and 30s.

Smith also references another engaging rant on the topic, this one by Financial Times of London management columnist Lucy Kellaway in the BBC’s online magazine.

“The really lethal thing about the whole language of business,” Kellaway writes “is that it is so brainlessly upbeat. All the celebrating, the reaching out, the sharing, and the championing in fact grind one down. Several decades too late, it is as if business has caught up with the linguistic spirit of 1968. The hippies got over it, but businessmen are holding tight.”

I don’t disagree that companies and politicians try sometimes too hard to keep to the sunny side and underplay any negative consequences to their actions by being coy with language. But not always. It’s a complex and nuanced world out there, and sometimes you need to use complex and nuanced words to describe it.

And there’s nothing wrong in saying the same old things in new ways. For starters, this is the basis and rationale for most media. I happen to think, for example, that “granularity,” a common business buzz word that Smith professes is new to him, is actually pretty darn descriptive and evocative.
 
Besides, Laurie Anderson wasn’t the first to declare “language is a virus” that mutates and evolves with astonishing speed.

But maybe I’m just rationalizing here.

Anyway, a couple of good reads.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 5:29 PM EDT

Updated: Thursday, 3 July 2008 5:35 PM EDT

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Earlier this month I had the good fortune of introducing Bill Dunphy, the tech-savvy journalist who is currently running the Torstar Metroland West Media Group's WebU, at the Mags U conference put on by Canadian Business Press and Masthead magazine at Toronto’s Old Mill.


The session was titled “Journalism 2.0 – A Digital Survival Guide for Editors.” But frankly what Bill talked about is instructive to anyone involved in any aspect of marketing and communications these days. And certainly the Web U “boot camp” he runs is aimed at all departments of the Metroland West (that’s west of T.O.) local and community papers, including general management, sales, marketing and circulation people as well as editorial types.


You could call Bill a newspaper industry lifer. In 26 years in the news business, he has worked as an editor, copy editor, daily news columnist, investigative reporter, crime reporter, satirist and weather columnist at community and daily newspapers in Toronto and Hamilton. You may also know him as the guy at the Hamilton Spectator who was taken to court by Hamilton Police in 2005 for refusing to hand over his notes from interviews with a murder suspect (he and the Spec eventually won the case at the appeals level about a year ago).


At the Spectator Bill chaired a staff group that introduced breaking news, blogging, video and podcasting to the newsroom and their website, thespec.com. His interest in the computers dates back to 1974 when he had to learn Basic programming for a part-time job in high school. In the years that followed, he used computers in the newsroom for writing, to build databases, create collaborative software, crunch numbers and do his own desktop publishing. Since the Web was born he's been a newsroom leader in adopting web tools for newsroom use, building online databases, blogs and wikis and playing a key role in training other staff in those technologies. Hence, his current role.


I thought by Bill’s advice on the four things everyone can do to “go native” in the land of digital fast was especially smart.  I asked him to recap the points in a post-presentation conversation we had in the Old Mill garden, and I’ve posted a clip of that on YouTube here.

Top line, his four fast tips are:

• start a blog
• set up an RRS feed
• sign on for twitter
• edit and post a bit of video

Do these things, Bill says, and even the most technophobic can be half way to comprehending all the revolutionary changes new media is bringing. Just messing around and getting your hands dirty with the stuff opens your eyes to the implications and possibilities.

Bill also had some good thoughts on the challenges media have right now in figuring out models to finally start making serious money online. He admits to not having any firm answers, and doubts anyone really has any yet. Interestingly, he suggested that magazines are perhaps best positioned to thrive in the new media environment, in large part because they are already extremely niche focused. (This isn’t to gloss over the fact that the magazine industry went through a massive and traumatic adjustment from being the dominant national mass media in 1950 to its now predominantly niche focus when the biggest of the last century’s revolutionary new media, TV, swept across the landscape.) And in the case of B-to-B magazines, their content may well be specialized enough as to charge for it.

But one of the smartest things he reminded us all –and I’ve never heard this said before, which says something- is that the newspaper industry, the one he grew up in, got its start in the 18th and early 19th century when printers went looking to find something to do with all the excess capacity they had. So in effect, the newspaper as we know them started without a clear business model…a cool new format and technology awkwardly looking to monetize itself.  Sounds awfully familiar.

Bill also writes a prescient blog about online media, but touching on all things Web 2.0 really, that he dubs The Idea Factory.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 10:19 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 11:54 AM EDT

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You can download PDFs of the key presentations here:

Chris Anderson

Paul Gillin

Bryan Segal

As well, here are links to some of the related press clippings around the event:

http://www.conversationalcapital.com/
http://www.mastheadonline.com/news/2008/20080516734.shtml
http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=522291
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/video/
vs?id=RTGAM.20080529.wvanderson0529

And finally, we’ve also posted photos from the day on flickr. The photographer, by the way, might be familiar to anyone who worked in Toronto agency circles in the past decade or two: Erwin Buck, who is clearly keeping the creative juices flowing in the wake of his early retirement from MacLaren: McCann a few years ago.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 10:52 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 11:39 AM EDT

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Every new medium and technology mimics the previous dominant media in their early awkward stages of development, Colleen DeCourcy, chief digital officer for TBWA Worldwide told the Toronto Ad and Sales Club’s annual Internet Day luncheon yesterday. But inevitably the unique new features and opportunities of the new medium emerge in their own right.

And now is the time for digital marketing and advertising to go beyond the traditional media “real estate” approach of selling time and space and embrace the opportunities for true consumer engagement, DeCourcy told the capacity crowd of 600.

“We really do have to move past that,” she said. “Technology is an enabler not a destination.”

Engagement is the new holy grail of interactive marketing, she said. Although the challenge is that the word means different thing to different people and is tough to measure.

It’s not enough just to get attention. Ideally engagement includes “time spent,”  “a relevant experience” and “having a conversation over time in an emotional and rational sense,” she said.

A Toronto native, now-based in New York, DeCourcy will chair the Cyber Lions jury at the 2008 Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in France later this month.  DeCourcy, who was creative director at the pioneering Toronto digital shop ICE before  it closed in the 2000 dotcom meltdown, went on to senior creative positions at Organic and JWT in the U.S. before taking  the top digital job at TBWA about a year ago.

DeCourcy applied communications theorist Marhsall McLuhan’s comments about the impact of TV during the 1960s to the impact of the Web over the past 14 years. In essence, she said, by changing how we view the world, the world has changed.

“The Internet is not an ad platform,” said DeCourcy. Rather it is causing a “social revolution on a scale of the industrial and sexual revolutions.”

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 5:24 PM EDT

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I was fascinated by the many issues and implications around the shuttering on May 21 of Disney’s MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) the Virtual Magic Kingdom. Most companies would kill to build a high-profile interactive social community with in excess of a million faithful users, but here was Walt Disney Parks and Resorts abruptly closing the three year old game site, apparently thumbing its nose at loyal fans  and taking a lot of heat online and off for their trouble. What were they thinking?

I first heard about the outcry on CBC Radio’s excellent weekly program on all things digital, spark (you can get the podcast of the show that originally aired May 7 here and on itunes). The Wall Street also ran a good summary story about it last week.

Disney isn’t saying much officially, but naturally a lot of others are. In fact, Disney’s only statement, really, when it announced the closing on April 7 was that the free site was originally created as only a temporary promotion to mark the 50^th anniversary of the opening of its first theme park, Disneyland in May 1955. The life of VMK, as it quickly became known to aficionados, had been extended several times since owing  to its immense popularity,   but the time had finally come this spring to move on to other promotional activities.

Critics piled on accusing the company of among other things crushing the dreams of the 8-to-14 year old primary VMK user base (although many adults were also apparently playing) and disrespecting the feelings of the community it had invited and encouraged to build the experience.

There is something to both those argument.  An academic speaking on the spark program made the point that if a real theme park shuts down the regular visitors would, of course, be disappointed, but probably not too emotionally invested in it. In a virtual theme park like VMK, where big parts of the experience are the social interaction and consumer generated content that are created by the visitors themselves, the users have a more intimate stake in the place. As such you could argue they deserve more of a say in its fate.  Morally, at least.  Legally, of course, every user signed away any ownership rights to anything they did or co-created in the VMK in the fine print of the user agreement they had to accept to get in the first place. 

Just as interesting, I think, is the fact that Disney’s success at making VMK a safe community for kids online has severely hindered the company’s flexibility in graciously closing the site. Because exchanging e-mails or phone numbers or really anything that would fellow VMK users  to identify each other off line was strictly verboten,  there’s no way for kids to ever find or reconnect with their VMK friends once the online park is shut. (Now we can ponder whether virtual friends whom we don’t know basic information about –like their names, where they live etc. - are really friends, but the answer from those who spend a lot of time immersed in MMOGs is unequivocally yes.)

So why would Disney provoke it loyal VMK users and violate just about all the conventional wisdom about building and maintaining vibrant social communities online? And, the abruptness of it all doesn’t quite add up either.

 Certainly, VMK had to be a very costly proposition to maintain, especially with all the human supervision needs that a place for kids requires. And, it is true, promotions are generally aimed at achieving short term goals.

But, thinking about online communities in terms of tactical promotional tools is extremely short sighted. And when something takes on a life of its own like VMK did, that’s gold. Why would you abandon it?  And assuming even if VMK wasn’t building overt sales and traffic for the real theme parks, aren’t the data and consumer insights from something like this more than worth the effort?

Speaking after his keynote presentation at the mesh 08 conference last week keynote. Club Penquin co-founder Lane Merrifield dropped some hints that there was more at play in the end of VMK. Club Penguin, of course, is the Canadian built site targeting a similar demographic that Disney purchased for $700 million last year.

I asked Merrifield if Disney executives had consulted him on the closing and what he thought of it all.  He was very careful in his response, but did say that Disney, in effect, had wanted to keep the VMK property going, but its partners in the project had engaged in some heavy-handed gamesmanship about its direction and fate. Disney was stoically taking the bulk of the PR hit for a decision that it wasn’t completely in control of, he suggested.

Disney’s partner in VMK, by the way, was the Finish Sulake Corporation, best known for creating the  Habbo online multiplayer community/game sites aimed at teens.

So maybe a big lesson, aside from be thinking about your exit strategy for social communities when you start them: be sure about your partners.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:31 PM EDT

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Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:46 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 2:07 PM EDT

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Kaplin, a former White House staffer, broadcast journalist and MTV politics and technology producer, predicted that as online show creators begin to draw audiences in the tens of millions for their programming they will be in the driver’s seat as traditional broadcasters inevitably seek them out to work their magic. See her comments here.

Kaplin, whose New York-based double Webby-award winning video sharing web site enables independent producers to create their own TV shows for the Internet, made the comments during the panel on the future of online video at the mesh conference 08 in Toronto May 21. 

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:53 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 2:10 PM EDT

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