I decided to get on the bandwagon and test out ChatGPT with a self-referential piece on the futility of using generative AI for any form of meaningful creative expression. It wasn’t quite an ‘if you type “Google” into Google, you can break the Internet’ moment, but I was pretty pleased with the outcome. It’s good to see ChatGPT arguing for its own restricted use.
Here’s ChatGPT’s response (no changes made!):
Generative AI has come a long way in recent years, offering impressive capabilities that have the potential to revolutionise numerous fields. From generating realistic images and videos to producing natural-sounding speech, the technology has proven to be incredibly versatile and useful for a wide range of applications.
However, when it comes to creative expression, generative AI falls short. While it may be able to produce impressive works of art or music, these creations lack the depth, individuality, and meaning that only a human can bring to the table.
Art and music are deeply personal expressions of the human experience. They are not just products of technical skill or a set of rules; they are the result of an individual’s unique perspective, emotions, and experiences. When a person looks at a painting or listens to a piece of music, they are not just observing a set of colours or sounds – they are experiencing something that resonates with them on a deeper level.
Generative AI may be capable of producing something that looks or sounds similar to a piece of art, but it cannot replicate the human element that makes that art truly special. Without the human touch, a piece of art or music is simply a collection of pixels or notes, devoid of any true meaning or emotion.
Moreover, generative AI lacks the ability to understand context, which is crucial when it comes to creative expression. A human artist or musician can draw inspiration from their surroundings, their culture, and their personal experiences, all of which influence the way they approach their craft. Generative AI, on the other hand, is limited to the data it has been trained on and cannot incorporate new experiences or emotions into its work.
Another limitation of generative AI is its lack of intentionality. When a human creates a work of art or music, they do so with a specific intention in mind. They may be trying to convey a message, express an emotion, or evoke a particular feeling in the viewer or listener. Generative AI, on the other hand, lacks this intentionality and simply produces a piece of art or music without any underlying meaning or purpose.
Of course, there are some who argue that generative AI can still be useful in creative fields. For example, it can be used as a tool to help artists or musicians come up with new ideas or to automate certain parts of the creative process. However, even in these cases, the final product still relies on the human touch to bring it to life and give it meaning.
In conclusion, while generative AI may be great for a wide range of applications, including image and speech recognition, it falls short when it comes to creative expression. Art and music are deeply personal and meaningful expressions of the human experience, and they require the human touch to truly come to life. While generative AI may be able to produce impressive works that look or sound similar to human-created art or music, they lack the depth, individuality, and intentionality that only a human can bring to the table. So, the point of a person reading an article, looking at a painting, or listening to a piece of music is not just to observe a collection of pixels or notes, but to experience something that resonates with them on a deeper level and touches their soul.
Pictured above: ‘uktv-it-crowd-finale-moss’ by TNS Sofres, shared under an Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licence
Launching Giving Culture
In December 2022, we launched Giving Culture®, a corporate gift voucher program that gives people the opportunity to enjoy artistic and cultural experiences across dance, film, music and theatre. Our three foundation partners in this venture, which is initially focused on activities in Sydney, are Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP) and Sydney Film Festival.
Our cultural institutions, artists and performers faced incredible difficulties in 2020 and 2021 through delayed and cancelled events, venues closed and travel restricted. Giving Culture was conceived and established as an innovative way to support our local arts community and help with the long-term sustainability of the sector. We were inspired by our own experience as regular subscribers and we see this as a way to to open up cultural experiences for more people to enjoy the arts. Crucially, it’s another avenue for organisations to support our vital arts sector.
Rather than limiting organisations and voucher holders to just one field of the arts, the magic of Giving Culture is that it opens up the opportunity for experiences across a wider array of dance, film, music and theatre – and potentially more in the future!
Giving Culture gives your organisation a unique and meaningful product that you can use for staff reward and customer incentive programs – one that has a dual benefit of supporting our local not for-profit arts sector.
We’d love to hear your feedback about Giving Culture, and also to talk to you if you’d like to find out more. Please go to www.givingculture.com.au for more information on our program. You can also follow Giving Culture on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
To pay or not to pay
Medibank’s very public decision not to pay a ransom for the return of sensitive data on 9.7 million current and former customers has created a lot of debate, and for good reason.
On the one hand, being very transparent and vocal on not paying is a clear message that might deter would-be cyber extortionists from taking that path in the future; on the other hand, you are now virtually guaranteeing that this data will be exposed with untold harm to millions of people – which has already started to happen.
It’s a no-win situation for Medibank, regardless of the decision it had have taken. Ultimately, someone or some group committed a crime in hacking Medibank’s systems and stealing the data in the first place, so you can’t hold the company liable for somebody else’s illegal actions.
Sure, Medibank probably needed to do something more to ensure the security of its data – an obligation that’s not without precedent. In most Australian States it is illegal to leave your car unattended and unlocked. Why is that the case? A vehicle is a dangerous thing that can cause a lot of damage in the wrong hands, so making it easier for those wrong hands to use it should be discouraged.
Our personal data is no different. In the wrong hands, it can cause a lot of damage. Especially financial information and health data. The biggest threat from the exposure of personal health information is identity theft, but it “could also open some people up to blackmail if it were released — or make them less open with healthcare professionals, says Dr Rob Hosking, who chairs the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners’ technology committee.” (ABC News – What do criminals want with our health data — and what could they use it for?)
Taking the unlocked car analogy, we need to be doing a lot more at a regulatory level in enforcing greater security and protection of our personal data – so it’s good to see the Federal Government acting quickly on this.
Putting corporate security obligations aside for a minute and looking at the pros and cons of paying the ransom, they are pretty clear. A typical ransomware case involves a cyber adversary breaching an organisation’s systems and either locking up or disabling core applications or encrypting the data, then demanding a payment to undo the damage. If you can’t quickly recover to full operations (or recover at all!) the economic cost and reputational damage of not paying the ransom is likely to be too great – so it’s better that you pay.
That isn’t too far removed from an old-fashioned kidnapping. Once the ransom has been paid, there is no point in the kidnapper harming the victim, so more than likely they will be returned safely to the family. You could argue that paying the ransom makes sense – as long as you can be sure that your systems are now secure and the adversary is not able to repeat the dose.
How do we try and stop ransomware attacks altogether? I remember being in Italy in the early 1990s when kidnapping was still rife. It was a common sight walking around a city to see police armed with sub-machine guns guarding residential buildings protecting specific families living there. It forced Italy to take a very tough stance. According to Decode39, “after years of high-profile kidnapping cases and ever-larger sums being paid to criminals, in 1991 the Italian government took a decisive step. It enacted a law that established the freezing of the financial assets of the captive’s family and loved ones, i.e. those who could have been coerced into paying. The somewhat brutal reasoning held that it was necessary to destroy the incentive for criminals to kidnap people, eradicating the possibility of a reward.”
Freezing the assets of a corporation (or instituting harsh financial penalties) to prevent a ransom being paid might work in discouraging typical ransomware attacks – but it won’t work for an extortion demand where data has been taken. That’s because the criminal group has an alternate source of income to the ransom demand. It can sell the data, or use it in other ways to make money. So, for Medibank, that’s why it’s been left in a no-win situation. If it paid the ransom, there’s still no guarantee that the data won’t be exposed or sold to other parties. It’s a criminal entity Medibank is dealing with, after all.
If we really want to stamp out ransomware, we’ve got to tackle the core issue – cryptocurrency. As npr puts it, the rise of cryptocurrencies has resulted in a surge in ransomware attacks because it has solved the problem that “has long plagued bank robbers and drug smugglers: how to transport and hide huge sums of ill-gotten gains without getting caught?”
The anonymity and difficulty in tracing some cryptocurrency transactions has made it so much easier for cyber criminals to execute successful ransomware attacks. In the Optus data breach, SmartCompany states that Monero was the crypto of choice for the Optus ‘hacker’ because it is “near-impossible for law enforcement to trace crime-related Monero transactions.”
Law enforcement agencies either need to get much cleverer at tracking down cryptocurrency payments (like the US Department of Justice (DOJ) was in seizing $715,000 in Bitcoin from North Korean ransomware actors) or, as cryptocurrencies become more mainstream, there needs to be a much stronger global regulation of cryptocurrencies … which opens another can of worms …
Injecting marketing input for winning tenders
In most large IT businesses, responding to RFPs and tenders is the domain of the sales and bid management team. The marketing department usually doesn’t play a direct role – which is a shame, because there is a lot of value they can add!
At Explore Communications, we were a little bit surprised when a request came out of the blue some years ago to assist with an RFP response for a major IT contract. However, it really shouldn’t have been a surprise; after all, the role we play is to help articulate the value of our clients’ products and services to the market. There can be just as much benefit (if not more!) in articulating that value to a single customer, especially when that could result in winning a multi-million-dollar deal or a highly strategic engagement.
Since then, we’ve helped out on a range of strategic bids for a few different clients, with our focus primarily on the executive summary and supporting content, including presentations and videos.
We’ve found that there are some really effective areas for marketing input in this process.
First of all, it’s great to be engaged early on. It’s much more difficult to have an influence on the overall direction and focus of the response just a week or two out from the submission deadline. By engaging early, you can better understand the motivations behind the RFP or tender, and have greater context based on the initial discussions that have taken place with the customer and also internally amongst the sales team. This in turn helps to distil what’s important to the customer, and to understand the core strategy and approach the sales organisation plans to take for the bid.
Second, having a marketing lens involved ensures that the bid response process maintains an external perspective, and doesn’t become too internally focused. Marketing can stay at arm’s length from the technical, logistical, financial and contractual elements of the bid – which are critical to ensuring the response meets the tender criteria but can also take it away from the overall theme and value you want to convey. By not being heavily involved in putting together the detailed response, marketing can have a much more objective perspective on the content and approach.
Third, it’s vital to get the executive summary just right. This is the one piece of content that every customer stakeholder will read, before they delve into their area of specialisation in the detailed response (which is potentially hundreds of pages). It’s also the content they will use to support their justification for their final decision when they need to convince the senior executive or board that they have made the right choice. Ultimately, anything you can do to make the job easier for the customer’s stakeholders in winning internal approval for their decision, the more likely you are to win the deal.
Three steps for getting the executive summary ‘just right’
In writing the executive summary, do it with the specific audience in mind – something in which marketing specialists excel. You also need to take a hierarchical approach with the content, prioritising what is of the most value to the customer.
First, clearly articulate what you see as the customer’s most critical objectives to be gained and problems to be solved with your solutions and/or services. You don’t need to repeat every one of these from the RFP or tender – that’s the job for the more detailed response behind the summary. What you are demonstrating is that you have not only listened to the customer, but you have thought deeply about their business and how you can help. It’s marketing’s role to challenge the sales team on what these most important elements are – if you get this right, the customer will immediately sit up and take notice of your response. Marketing’s early engagement in the process really helps here because these ‘nuggets’ might not necessarily be present in the tender documents themselves; they might have been gleaned in earlier conversations and meetings with the customer.
Second, tie these outcomes to the value that your solutions or services can provide, and be more descriptive on how they will achieve those outcomes. At the end of the day, the customer is buying something from you. This will also be the critical component supporting how the customer will sell their decision internally. Here it’s worth keeping in mind what will differentiate you from the competition.
Third, and this is particularly relevant to significant multi-year or multi-million-dollar contracts, articulate why your company is the right one to choose. Again, this needs to be tied to the customer’s objectives and concerns, but the criteria are more likely to be general in nature – risk, security, profitability, competitiveness, longevity, viability, etc. This content will also be relied on to justify the decision internally.
Finally, it’s not a bad idea to challenge the customer’s thinking at the end of the summary. If they have read this far, then it gives you an opportunity to plant a seed in their minds – something that might influence their decision on the proposal. It might be a different way of tackling the project, an additional offering that you think will add value, or it might be related to a future opportunity that you know is coming up with that customer, where you can already start the sales process. It shows that you have gone over and above the constructs of the original tender or RFP, taking into account the customer’s broader organisation and needs.
Explore Communications has had a high success rate on the bids we have worked on over the years, but we certainly can’t take credit for the wins achieved – there is so much more that goes into a successful tender response! However, it is worth taking that extra bit of effort on those contracts that you really have to win (or should win!) and that will really make a difference to your business. If the one document that every customer stakeholder reads is not up to scratch, that puts you behind the eight ball at the very start.
(Photo by Waseem Farooq from PxHere)
While interviewing a client for a whitepaper about recruitment last week, the concept of “candidate care” came up:
“Your reputation as an employer is critical, so it’s also important to be practising ‘candidate care’ throughout the recruitment process. That means treating your unsuccessful candidates just as well as you treat the successful ones. A bad experience is more likely to be shared than a good one, or that candidate might end up being your customer one day.”
That resonated strongly for me, for a couple of reasons.
One of my close relatives had a very poor recruitment experience applying for a job at a major supermarket chain. After completed two rounds of interviews and then a medical, he didn’t hear anything further in relation to his application. I thought that was odd for a couple of reasons.
First, why make him undergo a medical if you are not going to be offering him a job?
Second, why was there no notification at all that he was unsuccessful?
Anyway, that didn’t deter him, so he applied for another job opening at the same company again a month or two later. Once again, he completed two rounds of interviews and then a medical.
Apparently, in the second interview he was told that the reason that he didn’t hear back the first time he applied was due to the area manager who interviewed him leaving suddenly. That’s not a good sign about the processes in place to effectively manage recruitment.
Despite all of this, he was unsuccessful again. At least this time he was notified – via an automated rejection message.
So, once again, why put him through a medical if there is no intention of hiring him? And where is the sensitivity in managing the rejection given the poor recruitment experience he had the first time around – let alone the amount of personal time and effort expended in going through the interview rounds and medical, twice.
Now, I don’t think this is a one off. Another close relative just had an almost identical experience. This time, it was for a graduate position at a large technology company. She made it through two rounds of interviews, then to a third interview – a “coffee catch-up” – as one of the final three candidates.
After that, crickets. So she assumed that someone else was offered the role. I told her that wasn’t good enough, and she needed to call them out on it, so she contacted them to confirm that she had been unsuccessful.
The company was effusive in its apologies – apparently, there was an automated system to inform unsuccessful candidates, and there must have been an error.
An automated system to let one of your top three candidates know they had been unsuccessful? After meeting your team face-to-face over a coffee? It’s astounding.
Even if the process had worked, and she had received that automated rejection email or SMS, it’s still a lousy way to close off the interaction.
If your recruitment process is based on an interpersonal connection between your hiring panel and your candidate, there’s a jarring dissonance when all of a sudden it’s switched to an automated response.
As an employer, you just need to think about the cumulative impact that has on your brand. Imagine that same negative recruitment experience, replicated hundreds if not thousands of times by unsuccessful candidates for job roles at your organisation. These are people who are already or are likely to be working in the same industry or field as your business; they might not just be your potential customer in the future, they might also be a potential future candidate, business partner or supplier.
Looking at it from a classic customer experience (CX) perspective, as a customer if you’ve engaged with an organisation via one channel, you expect that you will continue to engage that way. Automation is fine, but only if you as the organisation have set the expectation that you will be using it for any response.
CX is just as applicable to business suppliers
At the start of this post I said this resonated with me for two reasons.
The second is my own experience as a provider of marketing services. Most of Explore Communications’ work is through industry word-of-mouth, recommendations and referrals, so potential clients generally approach me first. I rarely make any ‘cold’ approaches or respond to tenders or general requests for proposal. In those instances, I’m OK with someone ignoring me, or sending an automated response – I do the same when it happens to me!
Most of the people who approach me will call, send an email or a LinkedIn message, which then leads on to an introductory meeting and chat, usually followed by a quote or a proposal. I’ve had a few instances lately where, despite that initial interpersonal engagement, and despite a few follow up emails and calls, I never receive a response back at all.
To me, that’s just as damaging to your brand as giving an unsuccessful job candidate the brush off. I’m OK with the fact that Explore Communications isn’t always the perfect fit and you choose to work with someone else – I’d just like to know, so I can move on.
Your corporate brand is reflected in everything you do, and it can be either strengthened or weakened by the way you engage with your wider business community. That includes your prospective candidates, partners and suppliers – and it’s just as important to show respect to those you say ‘no’ to as those to whom you say ‘yes’.
Long live the conference!
After the last two years of webinars, virtual events and remote presentations, I was starting to wonder if the days of the big in-person conference were numbered.
Just thinking about the effort of getting up early to travel, finding the venue (and parking), drinking sub-standard coffee and eating too much unhealthy food – was going to a conference all worth it?
Last week, attending Pearcey Foundation’s Riding the Digital Wave Summit brought it all back for me. I got up at 5:30am to leave the house at 6. Two and a bit hours later, I was driving around Sydney Uni looking for a place to park, and at 8:45am I was at the registration desk, sipping a very average coffee from one of those pump-action insulated pots.
However, straight away I was chatting to colleagues I hadn’t seen in person for last two years and soon found myself sitting at a table as The Hon. Victor Dominello (pictured above) opened the conference, giving us some great insight into the challenges of digitising NSW Government services. From there, we were treated to a stream of amazing speakers, ideas and loads of information and insight.
I remembered why conferences like this could be so magic. You hear things you might not have realised before, and they spark your own thoughts – it was a conference that sparked the idea to start Explore Communications. Our logo is based on my handwritten notes from that event.
You meet people that you otherwise might have only had an email exchange with in the past, or they were one of the faces in a video conference. You see and hear brilliant people, concepts, businesses and technologies for the first time, or to a depth you hadn’t been exposed before.
Best of all, you experience all of this directly, spontaneously and dynamically – most of which is missed in articles, podcasts, videos and webinars. You are also more engaged. At home, watching on from your desk, it’s nothing to be checking your email or taking a call while you’ve got the webinar on in the background – but in the room, in front of the speaker you can be giving them your full attention, and you reap the benefits of that attention too.
Is there still a place for virtual events and webinars. Definitely. The last two years have proven why this works. You lower the barrier to entry, and you can reach people who would otherwise be unreachable. There are potentially no limits on the size of the audience, and you’ve got a long tail impact, where the video content can be posted online for future consumption. In fact, putting on the Summit last week, we had the debate – given that a lot of people weren’t able to travel to be at the conference, do we run it as a hybrid in-person and virtual event? The decision was taken to make it in-person only, so as to preserve the experience for people in the room and capture the magic of the conference. The great thing is that the Pearcey Foundation managed to do that, and also recorded the event, so we can make the proceedings available to everyone shortly. I’ll update this with a link once the event content is posted online.
Will we see the ‘Great Resignation’ here, or will it be a case of the Great Pumpkin?
There has been a lot of evidence lately that Australia is about to suffer from the ‘Great Resignation’ – a massive staff turnover rate that some parts of the world are already seeing. The U.S. Government reported a record level of workers leaving their jobs in August and more than 25 million people quit their jobs in the first seven months of this year, according to PBS NewsHour.
With Halloween coming up this weekend, will the Great Resignation actually happen in Australia, or will it be like the Great Pumpkin? As a kid, I grew up regularly re-reading old Peanuts comic books, and one of the best story lines was a recurring theme about Linus’ dogged belief in the arrival of the Great Pumpkin in the pumpkin patch on Halloween night. Of course, the Great Pumpkin never appears.
So will we see the Great Resignation here?
As everything slowly returns to ‘normal’, there has to be some sort of bump in employee turnover, but I’m not sure it will be as massive as predicted. In one recent survey, Slack found that more than half (59.9%) of Australians say they are likely to change jobs in the next year, and in this poll embedded in an article from Gartner’s Aaron McEwan in news.com.au, 54% say they have already quit or are planning to leave their job.
Most of us have been living a very insular working and personal existence for the last two years, and anyone who has been unhappy in their job or looking for a career progression or change has most likely parked any decision to leave. We haven’t been mixing with many people outside of our work and family bubbles, we haven’t travelled or attended conferences, and we haven’t been in the office or met with friends or industry colleagues for lunch or drinks after work. As things open up and we start to do more of this, new job opportunities will come up. Businesses that contracted during the pandemic will be re-hiring and other sectors will start growing rapidly, and the decision to leave that we had parked during the pandemic suddenly becomes viable again.
However, the biggest change we’ve seen through all of this has been in the attitudes of organisations and our business decision-makers towards working from home and hybrid work. I think this will have a more significant bearing on people’s decision to move or stay put. In 1998, when we planned to move to a country town from Sydney’s inner west, I had my heart in my mouth when I asked my employer if it might be possible to work from home three days a week and come into the office for two. The prevailing attitude in my organisation and just about every other business at the time was against me. If they had have said no, I was prepared to quit. Luckily for me they said yes, and I proved it was possible to be a productive and collaborative member of the team from that day on.
How things have changed!
Earlier this year, a survey conducted by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald of 50 of the nation’s largest companies found that, overwhelmingly, these organisations would be permanently adopting hybrid working policies for office-based employees. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. What about the public sector and the vast majority of Australian organisations that operate in the small-to-medium business sector? The attitudes have definitely changed. The Committee for Sydney surveyed 130 organisations that employ 640,000 workers across Australia and found that 51% expect their workers will commute to the office for just three days a week, and 36% expect their staff will cluster their office days from Tuesday to Thursday (see further ‘Bosses anticipate ‘long weekend’ trend to stay once Australians head back to the office’). In an embedded survey in the same article, when asked what’s most important to you in a job?, 58% of readers responded with ‘work/life balance’.
In a survey that I’ve read but is yet to be published, it’s really interesting that business decision-makers are far more positive about the experience of remote and hybrid work when compared to workers in general. Work/life balance is one of the biggest factors in this response, as well as the effectiveness of collaborative technologies to enable remote work. This says a lot about why organisations large and small have embraced a permanent hybrid work policy and why I also think the Great Resignation will be a small bump rather than a big shock as life slowly returns to normal.
Workers want flexibility, and a better work/life balance, and will go looking for it elsewhere if their current employer isn’t going to offer it (see, for example, ‘Here comes the Great Resignation. Why millions of employees could quit their jobs post-pandemic’). But that doesn’t seem to be the case in Australia. Most Australian businesses, from the biggest to the smallest, seem to be happy to offer their office-based workers greater choice and greater flexibility in where and how they work – taking away one of the main reasons cited for the Great Resignation.
So how do I wrap this up with a final allusion back to the Great Pumpkin? In a Peanuts strip from 1961, Linus cites confirmed appearances of the Great Pumpkin in Connecticut and Texas as evidence for the likelihood of it showing up in his local patch while Charlie Brown argues that conditions might not be ideal for it. That’s my argument too – I think conditions in our ‘local patch’ and the enthusiasm with which Australian business has embraced hybrid working will minimise the chances of the appearance of the Great Resignation here.
Explore turns ten
Explore Communication has turned ten! Like with a lot of things in life, it seems to have been forever and the time has just flashed by. I set it up with no expectations beyond creating a sustainable long-term business that would be the vehicle for me to “explore” new opportunities, and work with a diverse set of organisations and people. Looking back on the last ten years, I’ve had one-off projects, short-term and long-term engagements with more than 50 different client organisations. I’ve been able to prioritise and spend time with my family throughout, which has been the biggest benefit of all. And I’ve worked with hundreds of great people, who have been instrumental in broadening my professional perspective and helping to make Explore Communications a success.
It’s also given me the freedom to try new business ventures and explore (there’s that word again) new ideas. To date, I’ve had to put these down to “learning experiences”, but I’m really hopeful that my newest venture is destined to succeed. Born out of the heart of the pandemic last year and based on my personal experience and wanting to make a difference to the arts sector, Giving Culture® is coming soon! https://givingculture.com.au If you want to know more, I’d be happy to chat.
I posted Explore’s anniversary news up to LinkedIn yesterday, and I was amazed and heartened by the response from my community. Thank you so much for the lovely comments, and thank you to everyone I have worked with and who has supported Explore Communications over the last decade. I’m looking forward to the next ten years with great hope and optimism.
Writing phrases that people can’t forget
This week, I had the great honour of introducing a panel session featuring four of the leading figures in Australia’s technology media sector over the past 40 years. The event was part of the regular Pearcey Conversations webinar series. These are monthly panel discussions capturing the stories and experiences from people involved in the Australian ICT industry to inspire the next generation.
‘Tech Scribes – telling the stories of digital disruption’ was moderated by InnovationAus founder and editorial director James Riley, with a panel comprising former technology editor at both The Australian and the AFR, Helen Meredith; former technology editor of the AFR Beverley Head; and former publisher at Allure (now Pedestrian Group), former editorial director at CNET and current publisher of Byteside Seamus Byrne.
There was a lot of reminiscing about the days before digital (hardcopy and faxed press releases, writing up stories on typewriters, newspaper layouts on bromides) and the incredible ‘rivers of gold’ in tech publishing and advertising in the 1980s and 90s when there was a plethora of IT publications and The Australian’s weekly technology section took up 40 pages.
Digital technology really changed things for tech journalists from the perspective of the growth of the internet, the accessibility and removal of the barriers to entry for start-up publishers and writers with low-cost blogs and website platforms.
The other hotly discussed topic was the initial struggle to have technology stories recognised and promoted by the mainstream, something that’s now ironically suffering the reverse problem. With technology now embedded as a part of just about everything we do, the difficulty is not in getting on the front page; it’s getting the technology angle to the story effectively and accurately covered.
There were two refrains throughout from the panel – how technology journalists today no longer have the luxury of time to write their stories and the importance for publishers and editors to invest in great writing.
The issue of time is a real problem. With so much competition to get breaking stories out quickly, how do you find the time and put in the effort to produce great content?
Unfortunately, we ran out of time all too quickly, and the panel probably needed another hour to really get into the future of technology journalism in Australia.
Beverley Head did end the session neatly though with a Clive James quote on producing great writing:
“One thought at a time. Clear. Articulate. And above all, memorable, if you can be. You’d like to write phrases that people can’t forget as soon as they read them.” https://www.azquotes.com/quote/1282407
Keep an eye out for a recording of the session, which should go up here in the next few days.
Is media coverage reporting still important?
Yes – media coverage is an important gauge of the overall success of your brand, not just on the performance of your PR program. Sure, you can use coverage stats to measure the success of a particular campaign or press release, but it is everything else that is happening around these activities that are really interesting.
Your PR strategy should be all about building ongoing awareness in the market of your brand and what your organisation does, which helps to generates impetus and increasing inertia over and above the specific PR activities that are executed. The metrics captured above are from ANZ for one of Explore’s clients for January this year – typically a very quiet month for PR, given it is our extended summer holiday period. Also, no traditional PR activities were undertaken that month. It’s a great sign that the PR strategy and approach is working, that your organisation and your products and services are in the conversation. It’s giving your brand a life of its own in the local market.
While public and private sector organisations and the media are increasingly relying on social media to amplify their content, it’s important as a brand to maintain a healthy marketing mix – one that doesn’t rely too heavily on social media activity. Facebook’s stoush with the Australian Government is a case in point. We also now know that the algorithms being used by search engines and social media platforms are influencing what content we see. This is driving people – including your customer base – to source content directly. Those direct sources include local and international media outlets, your website, blog, videos, webinars, events, press releases and announcements, etc. A diversified social media presence is also part of this mix, but most importantly it is the social network – the people your brand is connected with – staff, partners, customers, analysts and journalists – who are helping to carry on this conversation about your brand. The manifestation of this includes the coverage you receive in media publications.
So, you can measure the success of a press release by the number of media clips it has generated, but that’s a very transactional approach. It’s better to measure PR success when things are quiet. Are people still talking about you when you don’t have any news or a new product to announce? Are you maintaining or increasing your monthly media coverage? What’s the readership like on your corporate blog posts? Are you adding followers and increasing views on social media channels?
Establishing a media monitoring and reporting service is a great way to start. Please contact us if you’d like to find out more.
explorecomms.com.au 
