Never Criticise the Competition: it’s not Politics
A couple of things this week reminded me of one of the first rules I spell out when I am giving PR or social media advice to a client: ‘never criticise the competition’. One came up today with Microsoft’s launch of the Xbox One, and the other is a pattern of behaviour I’ve been following on Twitter which culminated in a pair of tweets yesterday.
There will always be exceptions, but by-and-large there is nothing to be gained by attacking the opposition – unless you are in politics. You are diverting the attention away from what you are there to talk about; you are giving your competitor publicity without having to lift a finger; and most readers will take what you are saying with a very large grain of salt – you’re hardly the independent observer, are you?
Case in point is the headline in today’s AustralianIT: ‘Microsoft Xbox One to target Telstra’s T-Box market’. While I don’t think Microsoft or its spokesperson mentioned the T-Box in this instance, it’s the sort of outcome you can expect if you do call out a specific competitor.
I think the journalist made his own conclusions as to which device was being challenged by Microsoft’s new product, and the result was a mention of the main competition in both the article’s headline and lead paragraph:
“MICROSOFT’S expansion of the Xbox One as an entertainment hub will put it head-to-head against Telstra’s successful T-box in the Australian market.”
Much more directly to my point about never criticising the competition was a series of to-and-fro on Twitter resulting from an IT vendor’s launch of a product recently that seems to have caught its competition napping. I was involved in the launch here in Australia, so I’ve been following the Twitter chatter in relation to the product, and these two tweets from yesterday (pictured below) perfectly encapsulate the concept. I’ve blurred the identities of all three players involved, but let me take you through it.
The first tweet is from one of the vendor’s integration partners, starting “Great overview…” Not long afterwards it’s followed up by the tweet “Awesomely bad <blurred-out product> Demo.” What’s funny is that both tweets point to exactly the same YouTube video.
I took a look at the profile of the second tweeter, which gives no clue as to his employer. A quick Google search reveals that, as expected, he works for one of the launch vendor’s main competitors.
So, if you are thinking about reacting publicly to a competitor, it’s important that you stop and think for a minute before you do it. Just remember that it’s not politics and, unless you are the founder of the company or the inventor of the technology, there is usually no ideological high-ground for you to take. You’ve probably chosen the company you’re working for based on a combination of one or more factors – including salary, employment conditions, corporate culture and reputation, the challenge, career opportunities and professional development .
And, given the amount of churn in the IT sector, it’s quite possible that, in a couple of years’ time, you will be working for the competitor that you were criticising. It’s a completely different proposition to switching political parties.
(Pictured top: “Barack Obama presidential debate preparations”, By Pete Souza (White House (P100212PS-0320)) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.)
The Cobbler’s Children
After more than 12 months in business, I’ve finally published a page of reference clients and some descriptions of the type of work with which Explore Communications has been engaged (see ‘Our Work‘).
It’s a little bit like the old saying that a “cobbler’s children don’t have shoes” or any number of similar expressions that I discovered when I was doing some research into the origin of the expression – including my favourite: “the minister’s children have no morals”.
Generally speaking, the phenomenon is called “vocational irony” – and in my case it comes down to being too busy to do Explore Communications’ own marketing!
So, what sort of work has Explore been doing over the past year?
It’s been really varied, ranging from tradition agency-style PR and case study development through to complete marketing strategy and program management. Clients have been predominantly in the IT space, but have branched into other fields too, including insurance, sport and retail. Explore has also been engaged in ‘pro bono’ work for start-ups, often based on a quid pro quo arrangement (the most recent trade was free yoga classes)!
The projects to date has been rewarding, often challenging and always educational. I’m really looking forward to the year ahead, and the opportunities that 2013 and beyond will bring.
(Pictured above: “Cobbler’s Shop, Holmfirth”, Copyright michael ely and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) licence.
Social Media and the CEO
Interesting blog post recently from Thomas Tudehope at Ogilvy PR – “Should CEOs and executives tweet?”. What makes it doubly interesting is that it was published in the aftermath of the social media furore created by CEO of Australian retailer Myer, Bernie Brookes. Brookes was commenting on the Australian Government’s decision to fund a National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) by raising the Medicare levy, that it would hurt Myer’s sales. (See Brookes’ comments reported in news.com.au as an example.)
While Brookes didn’t make his comments via Twitter, there is every chance he would have done so if he was an active tweeter.
It’s not really a surprise that Brookes isn’t on Twitter. Myer is an old school retail organisation (in fact, it doesn’t seem to have changed much since I was working there part-time as a university student more than 20 years ago) and Brookes is described as a ‘veteran retailer’ in the press. At the very least Myer does have a Twitter account and Facebook Page, and it did apologise for the comments made by its CEO:
We are very sorry to those who have been hurt by our comments & want to make it very clear that we support the introduction of the NDIS.
(https://twitter.com/Myer_MyStore/status/329755277031247874)
It was probably too late by then, with the #MYER hashtag on Twitter already doing plenty of damage to the brand.
So, would it have made any difference if Brookes was on Twitter?
On the face of it, Brookes’ comment as a tweet would have made matters worse for Myer. There would have been an instant response and Twitter community would have had a direct target for its anger.
However, if Brookes had been an active Twitter user, it’s more than likely he wouldn’t have made the comment in the first place. Why not? Because he would have been far more sensitive and aware of the impact his words have on the wider Australian community.
Instead, Brookes made his NDIS comments to a Macquarie Investment seminar – a context and an audience where Brookes’ comments would have seemed reasonable – and I’m sure very few people in the room would have blinked an eye. (You only need to read the straight reporting in The Australian’s Business section for an example.)
So, should Brookes be on Twitter? Ogilvy’s Tudehope would say that he should be, with the right preparation and training. However, he states, the “single biggest obstacle for executives looking to become more socially savvy is having the appropriate social media knowledge, time or technical skills.”
I disagree. I don’t think every CEO or senior executive should be on Twitter. While most of them wouldn’t have the time to manage an account themselves, more importantly I don’t think many have the inclination or desire to communicate that way. Twitter is not for everyone (even those in the media industry!) and I think it is just as lacking in authenticity to ‘ghost tweet’ for a CEO as it is to force a senior executive onto Twitter in the first place, simply because you think it’s the right thing to do.
Over the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to work with senior executives who have expressed a desire to learn more about Twitter and start actively participating. My approach is first of all to question them on why they want to get involved and what they feel they would get out of it. I also like to sound out what sort of engagement they have already as users of social media.
So, should Brookes be on Twitter? I doubt it. I don’t know much about the man himself, but from what I know about the retailer and its management style, I can’t see him as someone who would readily take to social media.
That said, while Brookes doesn’t have to be an active participant, what he does need to understand is how social media works and what sort of impact his public comments have or will potentially have on the online community, which is ever-approaching the wider Australian community.
I’m sure that is something his media and marketing advisors are doing right now.
Social Media, Coca-Cola and Me
I consider social media as a marketing communications channel, and not one that necessarily has a direct impact on sales, so I’m a bit skeptical of any claims made by SMEs (social media experts!) that social media can directly influence sales.
As a prime example, in news last month Coca-Cola hasn’t seen any direct correlation between what it terms “online chatter” and short-term sales (see “Buzzkill: Coca-Cola Finds No Sales Lift from Online Chatter” in AdAge). As at the time of writing , Coca-Cola has clocked up over 63 million likes on Facebook, so it’s in a pretty strong position to comment.
While I advise my clients that social media is an important component of the company’s marketing strategy (and a very cost-effective one for start-ups), I would never suggest that your sales strategy can entirely depend on it.
As a customer engagement and customer service channel, applications like Facebook and Twitter can be used really effectively. In terms of service, as a customer if I want a more rapid response from a company than traditional phone or email contact methods, I will generally tweet my question or complaint. It’s effective because the interaction is played out in front of the wider social group, not secretly between you and the company in question.
What’s interesting is my own experience with Facebook and LinkedIn advertising. Offered free advertising vouchers for both sites, I’ve now tested both out with mixed results.
For Facebook, I set up a test ad for the page of one of my clients and, in the space of a week, we had quadrupled ‘Likes’ for the page.
However, that did not translate into an upward trend in sales. In fact, I doubt there was any correlation at all between new sales generated and the Facebook page likes.
What it did achieve was a massive surge in audience, via a channel that seems to be pretty engaged, which might have some longer term outcomes – provided we can keep the engagement going. And that bigger audience does give us the opportunity, through Facebook’s ‘Reach’ function in the Pages Admin area, to get detailed information on the demographics of our audience – which we can use to plan future marketing campaigns.
For LinkedIn, I tried an ad for this business – Explore Communications – with pretty dire results. Similarly to Facebook, you can target your ad to a particular demographic profile and you are very limited to how much information you can display, but I found that there has been virtually zero response – the two spikes of clickthroughs have been when I first submitted the ad, then revised and re-submitted the content, which I put down to the LinkedIn administrators reviewing the ad before approving it!
Sure – my experience is completely at the other end of the spectrum to Coca-Cola’s, but it’s something worth thinking about for start-up organisations looking to the virtually ‘free’ channels that social media offer for marketing your products and services. At this stage in social media’s evolution, it’s very easy for a potential customer to like your page or follow your tweets. It’s another thing again for them to buy.
By the way, I haven’t like Coca-Cola’s Facebook page. I can’t stand the stuff.
(Pictured above: “Coca-Cola, I”, By Newtown grafitti, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licence.)
When Did IT Suddenly Go Mainstream?
When did IT
suddenly go mainstream? This morning listening to local radio over breakfast, I heard Ry Crozier, journalist with ITNews.com.au interviewed on ABC Illawarra about the NBN. Seventeen years ago, when I started out in the IT industry, it would have been a minor miracle for a specialist IT journalist like Ry to appear on mainstream broadcast media. Back in the mid-1990s IT (and IT media by default) was most definitely niche.
I remember being interviewed by Mia Freedman in a work context many years ago for Channel 9’s Today show – but the piece ended up being a lifestyle segment about working from home, rather than about IT. I tried to cover technology with reference to the relative merits of ADSL and ISDN, mobile data, security and IP telephony (I even had some gadget in my pocket from Telstra that I’d been asked to mention) – but that section of the interview never made it to air.
Back then, if someone asked what I did at a party, I used to say I worked in the computer industry, which I resorted to when people’s eyes would glaze over if I was any more specific than that. Now, everyone seems to know what cloud is, has an opinion about the NBN, and can talk knowledgeably about the relative merits of mobile data plans.
My kids can reliably tell me about Apple’s latest iPhone, iPad and iMac; or the differences between Windows 7 and Windows 8 as an operating system.
So when did IT go mainstream? Ironically, you could date it from March 2008, when ABC’s MediaWatch created the “Phantom of the Internet Trophy” in an episode featuring journalist and IT publisher David Richards. I was up in Queensland for the MediaConnect Kickstart IT media conference and during the day word spread that David would be appearing on that night’s MediaWatch episode. Just before it was due to go to air at 9:15pm, dinner tables emptied en masse as everyone headed off to find the nearest TV. An appearance on MediaWatch, while rarely a positive experience for a journalist, was at least validation and recognition for IT media (and by logical extension, the IT industry) from the mainstream press.
Now, you’ll see IT journalists popping up regularly in mainstream media. To pick a few, Seamus Byrne has a regular spot on Channel 7’s The Morning Show program, Angus Kidman appears on The Project on Channel 10, and ZDNet journalists, including Josh Taylor, are regularly interviewed for ABC TV and Radio news.
So why has this happened? Well, IT has become much more pervasive in our everyday lives.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), “in 2008-09, nearly six million Australian households (72 per cent) had internet access, a sizeable increase from around one million (16%) in 1998.” (ABS Report, ONLINE @ HOME). That number has continued to climb.
Approximately 62 per cent of Australians were using social media in 2012 (see the State of Australian Social Media 2012 infographic, compiled by Sensis, then developed and created in association with the Yellow Pages and AIMIA).
And, based on AIMIA research, 38 per cent of Australians own a tablet, up from 16 per cent in 2011, and 76 per cent have adopted smartphones. (8TH ANNUAL AUSTRALIAN MOBILE PHONE LIFESTYLE INDEX, the AIMIA Mobile Industry Group).
Finally (and this is my own thumb suck observation), use of some form of cloud service closely shadows household broadband access (at 73 per cent in 2010-11, according to ABS), smartphone adoption and social media use.
However, despite this rapid uptake of computing in Australia, there is still a huge amount of uncertainty in the community, largely because the complexity of the concepts and technology underpinning IT are still highly visible. You only need to look at the intensity of the NBN debate today, and the “facts” that both sides of the debate are able to push, largely unchallenged, into the media (see, as an example, “The real NBN casualty”, in Technology Spectator).
Google Wins Australian High Court AdWords Battle
It’s probably not such a surprising outcome – Google has just won an appeal in Australia’s highest court overturning a Federal Court decision that it had engaged in misleading or deceptive conduct in relation to its AdWords product (see a PDF of the High Court’s press release). The original action had been brought by the Federal Government’s Australian Competition and Consumer Commission on behalf of companies using competitor’s trademarks and brand names in Google AdWords so that their pages appeared in the ‘Sponsored Links’ section at the top of Google’s search results.
While the individual action of companies to use their competitors’ registered trademarks in such a way is clearly a breach of the trademark holder’s intellectual property rights, the High Court found – unanimously – that Google itself was not in breach.
As someone on the receiving end of trademark breaches like this – when I was part of an in-house marketing team, every other week we were firing off legal letters and emails to both Google and the company misusing our trademark – it was incredibly frustrating to be bringing up the same complaint with Google asking them to remove the offending AdWord, knowing that Google was pocketing revenue every time that trademark was appearing in searches.
Now, with this result, there is even less of a reason for Google to act promptly when it receives a complaint about AdWords from the legitimate trademark holder. Of course, trademark holders still have recourse to contact the offending advertiser directly, or to take legal action against them, but it’s potentially a very time-consuming and laborious process.
In the short-term, the best advice is vigilance. You should be checking your trademarks weekly in Google searches, and firing off emails and legal letters when you see it in use by one of your competitors. To make things easier, ask your legal team or your legal adviser to draft up a template for you – that way you can just drop in the new company name and contact details each time you need to send.
In the long-term (and I’ve thought about this a lot in the past) how do we get better protection for our brands and trademarks online? Companies like Google have no incentive to act. The more people using AdWords or other similar products, the more money they make. The only way we can make it work is to use technology smartly. It should be possible to integrate the databases of government intellectual property agencies around the world with the main search engine providers, and develop a program that checks submitted words and phrases used by advertisers against the database. If the trademark holder’s details in the specific country or countries don’t match with the advertiser’s details, put the onus on the advertiser to prove otherwise.
Chance of that happening in real-life? Doubtful.
For more news and analysis on the decision, see:
- Australian Financial Review – http://afr.com/p/technology/google_triumphant_in_high_court_poOxaajC2unjFcCnr7WV8M
- Business Spectator - http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/High-Court-to-rule-in-longstanding-Google-ACCC-cas-pd20130205-4MHQ6?OpenDocument&src=hp12
- Computerworld – http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/452911/google_cleared_by_high_court_deceptive_adwords_case_/
(Pictured above: “Search-Engine-Marketing”, By Danard Vincente, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licence.)
Adequate Disclosure and Blogging
Late last year, I received an email from a company wanting to “host an advertisement” on my site. I thought it was spam, so I deleted it. However, a couple of weeks later, the same person sent me a follow up email, including this offer:
“I believe we offer a very attractive system of advertising. You would be paid a yearly-renewable fee for placing a text-based advertisement that is appropriate to the topic of your site.”
Given the context and prior correspondence, this offer appeared to be genuine – so I looked into the media planning and online branding company behind the email. According to its website, the company uses “the latest technology and greatest minds in the industry, to meticulously source, plan and execute a cross-platform holistic campaign.” The company “forms partnerships with smaller niche sites.”
I was curious to find out more, so I replied. Here’s the offer the company made:
“After reviewing your website, we think that a new blog post would be the best and least intrusive option for you. We have two ways of doing this:
A) You are free to come up with the content of the article or blog post, but we do ask that it is in some way relevant to our client and is composed of roughly 300 words.
B) I can ask our copywriters to craft an article to fit your site.”
I was also given an example of how it works – a Citroën C4 review on http://www.mycarreviews.co.uk :
“The advert can be found within the third paragraph – ‘J.D. Power’.”
For my part in the scheme, working with a telecommunications, beauty, health, tourism or finance client would ensure me US$140USD per year, while working with an online gaming client (poker, casino, bingo, etc.) would get me US$150USD per year.
Looking at the UK-based My Car Reviews site, there is no form of disclosure I can see with regards to commercial interests or agreements.
The insidious nature of this form of advertising and branding completely undermines the whole concept of blogging and independent content and opinion.
Australian Government broadcaster ABC’s Media Watch program covered the issue of disclosure in blogs in October 2012:
“The fact is, whether Australian bloggers disclose their commercial agreements to their readers is entirely a matter for them. In the United States, it’s the business of the Federal Trade Commission which states firmly that :
…bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.
— Federal Trade Commission, Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, 2009”
Similarly, in the UK, the Office of Fair Trading has taken action against inadequate disclosure for example, with Handpicked Media, an operator of a commercial blogging network (OFT secures promotional blogging disclosures).
However, with the sheer number of blogs and the unregulated nature of the medium, how can any regulatory authority successfully enforce guidelines or legislation in this area?
For any readers of my site, please note that I will not be publishing any paid content or promoting companies or brands for money, and where any content relates to Explore Communications’ commercial interests or clients, I will disclose the relationship!
