The Buffalo Blog

The damaging media spotlight

Luke Johnson wrote in this Tuesday's FT about the damaging effects of the media spotlight when it is unleashed in anger. He highlighted some interesting opinions about reputation but appeared to miss the point on media crises and the long-lasting effects they have on companies.

Contrary to his article, the effect of a media mess-up can easily destroy a company, perhaps even more so in the B2B space. The colossal amounts of money spent in B2B industries makes people a lot more diligent in their selection of suppliers. A whiff of malpractice, failure, or underhanded tactics, in the press, will quickly see a supplier struck-off any procuremrnt list.

The fact is that bad press stays with a company for a long time; interminably now with Google news cataloguing just about everything on the web. In the consumer space, as with his Bernard Matthews example, sometimes price comes to triumph over opinion but this is rare. The oft-cited example of Ratner’s Jewellers, destroyed by derogatory comments of its owner, is a clear example of a media crisis turned business disaster.

It’s important for public facing businesses to recognise the reputation risks that are out there. Don’t stop talking to the press, just put the measures in place to respond appropriately when things go pear shaped.

Bad Bloggers

Communication has taken a new turn in recent years.  The freedom to communicate with vast audiences has never been as great as it is today.  Businesses, governments and the public all have the access to platforms that allow them to speak to whoever they want, whether the audience like it or not!

There is now a growing trend of those who are now using these communication vehicles to undermine, belittle and in some cases attack other people.  These acts of libel are now creeping into the business sphere. Some online publications for example, have been experiencing high volumes of businesses posing to be rivals and posting pretentious, potentially damaging, blogs and opinion pieces. An example is IT Director, a respectable publication, that is now actually having to vet people who post articles or opinion pieces in order to ensure that they are actually the person who they claim to be.  This underhanded posting is clearly not cricket, however in such an unregulated arena as blogging who’s to stop them?

The media have highlighted the issue of detrimental communication backfiring on individuals.  The Times commented on how Tricia Walsh-Smith’s YouTube divorce campaign went against her when the settlement judge condemned her for humiliating her husband.  Of course the more these occurrences are brought into the legal limelight the more likely it is that bodies will attempt to regulate the social media landscape – this would be damaging for content and blogging in general.

If businesses are found to be misusing blogs, forums or various other new media communication tools then there should undoubtedly be heavy consequences. The problem is that without going down costly legal routes this is unlikely to happen. In the meantime social media users should band together and regulate for themselves. It is up to the reader to be vigilant and savvy enough to question supposedly independent pieces and to flag them up as soon as possible.  Businesses and individuals using these innovative forms of media simply to vent grudges or slander competition should be exposed for what they are doing.  Hopefully through this collective ‘policing’ of the new media landscape, social media can remain free from restrictive legislation without compromising the content.

Media Moogles – Google media domination

The Guardian’s Media 100 was released yesterday filled with the big and bright of the ‘media’ industry (if the expanding and multifarious industry can still feasibly be categorised into such a neatly fitting box). Predictably, and I’d infer, by a long way, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made number one spot of all powerful new media gurus.

The achievements of the ever-expanding Google entity alone should be enough to secure this accolade, however, there is something that puts Google so far ahead in these rankings that it is almost scary to think about.

Google has rapidly managed to go from innovative, quirky ‘new media’ start-up to what is, the living, breathing and evolving centre of the web. Indeed it is reported that 70% of all web traffic is now directed via Google searches. This empire has been created with only the smallest whiff of anti-competitive investigation even though the company does have what is unquestionably a monopoly of the search industry. It’s clear that Google developed just too quickly for anyone to notice.

The fact is, Google now dictates whether your company exists or not online; being hidden from Google means being hidden from the world and almost all of your customers. Ask yourself, would you go to the second page of a Google search for a casual search term? Would you continue searching for a company if you couldn’t find them via Google in a few minutes? Very few people will take the time to consult a phone directory or call 118 if they’re just doing an initial search. This means if you’re dead to Google, your dead to the internet.

This uninhibited dominance of search has to be the real reason behind the Google top spot and will continue to be so for some time. Sergey and Larry’s invincible position in the Guardian Media rankings would really need something as industry changing as Google itself to ever truly dethrone them.

The company now owns almost all online visibility and companies that don’t realise this will lose interest, lose clients and ultimately, lose themselves in the age of Google.

Achieving the right 'Phorm-ula'

The continuing controversy over Phorm (the advertising service secretly trialled by BT to track and target ads based on internet surfing patterns) highlights exactly where so many advertisers, new wave advertising services and social networks, desperate to wring money out of their service, are going wrong. Two elements are continually prevalent, those of awareness and trust – do users know what they’re being signed up for and do they trust that it is both legitimate, secure and won’t see their details sold to every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes begging.

The trouble is that consumers either don’t perceive this trust in the first place due to clandestine tactics of those less scrupulous marketers or they initially trust the company or service but it is promptly taken away when advertising comes into the equation especially when it is done ‘under the radar’.

A prime example of this is Facebook and its ‘revolutionary’ yet universally condemned, Beacon advertising service. The trouble is that users never signed up to Facebook to be plied with advertising and, as such, its ‘Beacon’ advertising service was destined for controversy from the word go. The decision to make it an opt-out rather than opt-in technology was one step too far for users, feeling aggrieved at having the service forced upon them. This action was truly damaging to what could have been a highly successful advertising product.

Predictably people were rather annoyed about Beacon sparking reams of bad press, a swift backtrack by Zuckerberg and a failure of the service to truly take off. One blog prints reports (though unconfirmed) of current click-through rates of just 0.04%, a pretty abysmal average. And while poor click-through rates obviously aren’t all due to distrust of Facebook, the secretive way in which Beacon was implemented definitely had an effect on the success of the system.

Now we find Phorm is trying similar tactics which also have blown up in their faces. Its secret trials with BT have created such a media furore that the EU may intervene and punish.

Online advertisers need to recognise that transparency is the key; keeping users fully appraised of what they’re signing up for is the only way to build the trust that might, with luck, lead to success. Launch a service in an ill-considered, secretive and invasive way and it’s simply doomed to failure and rightly so.

Zattoo - a gift horse?

Interesting news this morning surrounding the launch of Zattoo – a Swiss/US startup that retransmits content from UK terrestrial broadcasters online, paying them commission according to subscriber numbers.

At the annoyance of the main UK players, Zattoo appears to have slipped under the radar of copyright law. Or at least no one has yet succeeded in unravelling the growing tangle of internet legislation to work out whether this is actually legal or not.

Either way the company has an interesting model, simply broadcasting terrestrial content online and inserting ads every time a user switches channels (a tactic that could be quite successful with today’s channel switching population). The service already has over 2m subscribers in old-Europe so could become quite lucrative.

However, more so than many ‘download to own’ players, Zattoo’s streaming service will require a big slice of bandwidth, so is subject to the limiting constraints of the UK’s network infrastructure and the types of deals internet users are currently signed up to.

Whether this latest company will do any better than those that have gone before remains to be seen. What is clear is that the UK broadcasters should look on this launch as an opportunity, not a threat. No one has clearly won the war between 4OD, iPlayer and ITV.com, and the Zattoo service only streams live media so is not a threat to these or their planned ‘Project Kangaroo’ service.

Zattoo provides a new outlet for terrestrial content and could help garner a wider audience and possible new revenue. UK broadcasters would do well to look at the growing number of questionably legal streaming TV services now online to see just how well this could go down.