By Kyle Austin
After news broke yesterday that the Rocky Mountain News would be closing its doors this week, the final issue of the Rocky was delivered today. The print issue, included a salute to its first cover 150 years ago, while the Website poignantly documented the Rocky’s last several weeks, through an online video embedded above.
2 comments February 27th, 2009
By Ginger Lennon
With APRs on credit cards doubling out of the blue, investment options dwindling and banks tightening their loan policies, RaceTalk connected with Kim Muhota – CEO of Pertuity Direct – to discuss how online social lending could play a significant role in freeing up consumer credit and helping the U.S. pull out of the financial market meltdown.
A financial services industry veteran, Kim provides insight into the current credit crunch and how social lending (otherwise known as peer-to-peer) is quickly becoming a viable alternative to traditional banks.
Q: Celent predicts that by 2010, there will be $5.8 billion peer-to-peer loans made in the U.S. – an 800% growth from 2007. Why do you think peer-to-peer lending has taken off the way it has?
Peer-to-peer lending has grown quite fast over the last 2 or so years for a number of reasons. Most recently, there is the issue of the liquidity crisis which means that even the prime borrower or small business owner does not have access to credit as they did a year or two ago. Traditional providers are also raising prices pretty aggressively to drive more revenue growth and compensate for added risk – and this impacts the consumer adversely.
There is also the fact that P2P loans are installment loans and are therefore very transparent and user friendly – in other words, there is no penalty pricing, hidden fees or anything like that. The P2P marketplace offers good potential returns for lenders and allows individuals to participate in a vibrant community of borrowers and lenders. So there are multiple compelling reasons why P2P is becoming more of a main-stream alternative than it was just 2 short years ago.
Q: What are the benefits of taking out a loan on a social lending site, as opposed to a traditional financial institution?
Social lending sites offer loans that are well priced (typically between 6.9% – 17.9%) and have fixed rates. Alternatives like credit cards have been increasing their interest rates across the board and have gotten very aggressive with penalty pricing and unfair fees. Social lending sites offer a loan product that allows you to go through the application and approval process in minutes; any time of the day.
The no-hassles loan option is a much better alternative to having to go into the branch, dealing with paper work and high fees. Further, it’s a great social networking opportunity where borrowers can tell their story and lenders can get to see where their money is going. Most of the lenders and borrowers are like minded individuals looking for a better deal than what they are getting from their bank.
Q: JPMorgan Chase — the largest credit card issuer in the U.S. — recently began adding a $10 fee to borrowers’ monthly balances (which accrues interest) and raise minimum payments to 5% from 2%. Is social lending a viable alternative to credit cards help consumers mitigate debt?
Absolutely. The fact that the loans are fixed term and fixed rate loans means that the consumer knows exactly what their loan payment is going to be and they know exactly how long it will take them to pay off the loan. It’s a great mechanism to get proactive around managing debt.
Q: Do you believe that social lending can play a role in helping to reverse the current economic crisis?
Yes. The current economic crisis is driven in large part to a lack of liquidity in the credit markets. Any option that provides much needed credit liquidity will help solve the current crisis – and the social lending model allows for the liquidity in the credit market by the consumer themselves. So in many ways, it’s the consumer driving the solution directly by participating in the social lending marketplace.
Q: How do you see the social lending space evolving in the next 9 – 12 months, following the October 2008 decision by the SEC to crackdown on the industry?
The recent regulatory changes raise the barrier to entry and increases the price to play in the space for the various companies out there. Most importantly, it provides an added level of regulation which is built to protect the consumer – and that’s always a huge positive. I think we will see more people adapting to the social lending marketplace as it continues to gain awareness and traction broadly. As a result, there is a good chance that we will see one or two innovative banks and financial services companies looking to partner with some of the social lending players as a way to get a head start into what is positioned to become a great customer acquisition channel.
For more of Kim’s thoughts on the current credit and liquidity crisis, you can check out his posts to the Pertuity Direct blog here.
Disclosure: Pertuity Direct is a Racepoint Group client
4 comments February 26th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
(Click image for full view)
Yesterday, Google made a move – somewhat discretely – that many have been expecting for some time. The move, bringing Google AdWords to Google News may seem like a meaningless announcement to some, but it could have vast implications on both the news and PR industry.
Steve Rubel hypothesizes that the move makes Google News a “PR playground.” He notes:
“Given the relative ease of launching a simple Google AdWords campaign we’re going to see a lot of companies – some legit, others not – buying up real estate on Google. On the whole, I am bullish about ads in Google News. The PR industry largely missed the first search engine marketing wave and I believe that, at least when it comes to smaller campaigns, we still have time to catch up.”
He raises an interesting point and it will be important to observe how competitors react to this new opportunity. Will PR and marketing departments view it as a new avenue to create influence? The competition is now open. For instance: A keyword like “iPhone,” which has brought up contextual ads for BlackBerry in past Web searches, now brings up the same ads when searching for iPhone news (pictured above).
However, as John Battelle notes, the real buzz around this move will likely be heard from the media and newspaper industry.
Robert Thomson, Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal, recently noted on Charlie Rose that:
“Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google, but it’s terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content.”
This statement was made before Google News was actually making money off of “distributing” content from newspapers and other outlets. How are newspapers going to feel now that Google is making money off of serving up their news, in a quantitative fashion?
3 comments February 26th, 2009
By Ben Haber
While CNN and Facebook teamed up to let people communicate via Facebook status while watching Obama’s speech Tuesday night, some members of Congress decided to use Twitter instead. While it’s great to see our elected officials communicating directly with their constituents and show that they are real people in touch with who they represent, it also brings about reminders that they need to be cautions about what they post.
At one point Republican congressman Joe Barton (TX) wrote: “Aggie basketball game is about to start on espn2 for those of you that aren’t going to bother watching pelosi smirk for the next hour.” Although his next tweet claimed that the previous post was actually from a staffer, his message was quite clear.
What elected officials have you notice tweeting? It will be interesting to see if they use it as a tool to let everyone know what they’re doing, or if they actually take the time to respond to their followers and have a dialog.
3 comments February 26th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
The Kindle 2.0 launch tour was in full effect earlier this week as Jeff Bezos and his Amazon PR team landed him a spot next to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. Jeff came across as a good pitchman, as he did on Oprah last October, however Stewart was still trying to figure out when the company started making things?
1 comment February 26th, 2009
By racetalk
In an unstunningly simple article in PR Week today (“Twitter has suddenly exploded“) we learn amongst other things that Edelman has 17 twittering staff and Racepoint 8, whilst Drew Benvie has twittered 3779 times.
I’d write here things like “AWESOME” and “WOW, HOW ENLIGHTENING”, but I understand sarcasm is the lowest form of wit so I’ll refrain.
What’s with all the numbers? Why on Earth are they the story? But before I explain myself, I will just dwell on the numbers for a minute.
…I don’t know a Racepoint consultant who isn’t on Twitter, and there’s a lot more of us than eight people! How can Porter Novelli global digital director Mat Morrison feel so confident in his data? He should have at least added the caveat that one can only determine when a Twitter user is a consultant from a specific PR consultancy should the individual chose to promote the fact in their personal profile.
Our micro-blog policy does not require consultants to declare their allegiance with Racepoint in their personal profile, but it does require them to declare interest when seeding or promoting a client or a client brand via Twitter.
But let’s move past these numbers to my main concern about this article; it makes next to no attempt at placing the Twitter phenomenon in context with the public relations discipline.
Sure, respect to Drew for the one quote in the article that attempts to move the agenda that way by referencing networking, story mining, issues tracking and news seeding, but the obsession with pointless data masks any kind of interesting story emerging.
There are many good attempts at defining public relations. Regular readers of my blog will know I gravitate towards thinking about it in terms of understanding and exerting influence in order to move stakeholders’ minds and behaviour to where you’d prefer them to be. But whatever it is, it isn’t about Twittering just as it isn’t about column inches or advertising-value-equivalent.
The story here is, or rather should have been, about how to wield tools and services like micro-blogging in the effective execution of your PR campaign strategy and ultimate achievement of your PR objectives.
Let’s take a look at Mat Morrison’s Twitter stream as of 10.35am today. Looking at the last 20 tweets (not a statistically significant sample I’ll grant you, but today I’ve not been inspired to be statistically inspirational), Mat @’s other Twitter users 22 times. Of these, 20 are in the PR and digital business, and 2 are unidentifiable in that regard.
I won’t go further and analyse the content and the ensuing dialogue because I don’t know Mat’s objectives here, but you could conclude from this analysis that he may well be achieving his PR objectives if his customer is himself / Porter Novelli. If his objective is to employ Twitter in achieving campaign success for his agency’s customers, if his objective in working with PR Week on this article was to imply just this, you’re going to have to look at more of his Twitter stream than I have to begin to guess if that’s happening for him.
If you want to know if your use of Twitter is working for you in a professional PR context, work through the normal cascade of objectives -> strategy -> tactics -> measurement. There’s no shortcut.
And for a bit of fun, take a look at this satirical video and ask yourself if others could look at your Twitter stream in much the same way?!
10 comments February 26th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
There have been a plethora of reports on social media, eBooks and trend watches which have come out over the last couple of weeks. Some of which we’ve already covered. However, this survey research by Jennifer Leggio (AKA Mediaphyter) of ZDNet, stood out in my eyes for the new data which it supplied. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading and re-reading the five pages (Couldn’t squeeze it into a 140 characters), which summarize results from the survey.
The 642 respondents, who were surveyed between November 2008 and January 2009, included top PR decision-makers at companies with 1,000 or more employees, with small business / start-up owners as secondary targeted respondents.
There were many takeaways from this research, many of which Jennifer notes, however I wanted to highlight a few key takeaways that I caught. Please take the time to read her full synopsis on the findings, if you haven’t already.
(Source: Jennifer Leggio, ZDNet)
(Source: Jennifer Leggio, ZDNet)
(Source: Jennifer Leggio, ZDNet)
2 comments February 25th, 2009
By Ben Haber
There is no doubt the economy has been felt by professional sports. Just today the NFL announced layoffs (about 15 percent of league employees) and selling tickets has become an issue for some teams as well. Apparently, one sales person for the Los Angeles Dodgers got a little too desperate (or as he explains, excited) and decided to market the signing of Manny Ramirez as his key selling point. In the age of the internet – beware.
The sales person (who remains nameless) left a voicemail for a potential Dodgers season ticket holder during which he said “I wanted to be the first to tell you the Dodgers are on the verge of signing Manny Ramirez! A little insider info!”
Unfortunately, this isn’t true. The person that received the message decided to post it online, and then the Los Angeles Times picked up the story giving it some national attention. We know times are tough, but imagine trying to get someone to purchase season tickets because of a rumor – especially one that isn’t even true! An interesting marketing strategy indeed…
3 comments February 25th, 2009
By Kyle Austin
Stuart Elliot wrote a great piece for the New York Times on Monday, which looked at Tropicana’s missteps with re-branding. After introducing new branding and design into its packaging of Tropicana orange juice in January, PepsiCo caved into public displeasure around its new branding, and is now bringing back its previous branding (Oranges look good; orange juice looks gross – as Dan Frommer Tweeted and summed up nicely).
However, Elliot made a more interesting point by drawing parallels between this Tropicana’s latest incident and what Facebook and Motrin went through recently with consumer uprisings.
(Tropicana’s now defunct orange juice branding)
Elliot then quoted HARO’s Peter Shankman within the article as saying:
“There will always be people complaining, and always be people complaining about the complainers. But this makes it easier to put us together. Twitter is the ultimate focus group. I can post something and in a minute get feedback from 700 people around the world, giving me their real opinions.”
To his credit, Peter made a very good point. There has always been, and there will always be people complaining about the actions of companies. However, the adoption of communication technologies like Facebook and Twitter, now allows consumers to really get their voice heard (both by the media and the company). Not just as one individual, but as as a powerful group of consumers, who can garner real leverage over the corporations that they are addressing.
With so many corporations adopting and embracing the use of these technologies (Zuckerberg created it for crying out loud) for building and listening to their brand perception , it amazes me how they aren’t able to take advantage of them. Facebook, for one, prides itself on being a democratic community (look at its proposed bill of rights), but somehow it always manages to act before listening to the feedback of its users. Newsfeeds, Beacon and now this.
The same goes for Motrin. They decided they wanted to launch a “viral” video, but didn’t bother gauging what feedback for that video may be virally may be before launching it.
Could Tropicana have avoided this $35 million misstep by using Facebook or Twitter? Well, the company isn’t clueless when it comes to new media. Just take a look back at their Orange America Twitter campaign in November. But could the company have used that foray into social media and micro-blogging to create a real brand following on Twitter? From what I’ve found, they don’t even have a Twitter handle. They definitely don’t run @Tropicana.
If they had taken the time to build off of Orange America, they could have created a real following of really passionate Tropicana drinkers (Yes, re: Stuart’s headline they do exist). They could have observed what was being said about the brand and more importantly they could have created dialogue around a “potential” re-branding. Maybe even implemented feedback into their plans, or stopped them altogether.
If social media has taught me one thing, it’s that the real wisdom, comes from the wisdom of the crowds. Especially when it comes to marketing.
Just like PR, branding and design need to evolve in order to integrate social media feedback into their campaigns. In fact, our newly created sister organization Two Martinis, which launched this week, plans to assist corporations in doing just that.
Aaron Hughes, a colleague of mine under the W2 umbrella and SVP at Two Martinis, believes that social media analytics and measurement are the key to making the most effective use of a client’s money – when it comes to branding and design.
He also believes that focus groups are too “aided” and “guided” to provide a true sense of customer perception. I believe he’s right.
If only more corporations could understand that the ultimate focus group, is now only a click away. Whether that’s Twitter or Facebook, is still up for debate.
5 comments February 25th, 2009
By racetalk
To recap, this is where marketing communications has got to go…
Interruption marketing (stop right there for 30 seconds while I hit you with this message even if this message is totally irrelevant to you) is dead.
Your brand and reputation is defined by everyone’s experiences with your organisation and their compulsion to share those experiences with others.
You simply have no choice, you have to converse. Dialogue is where it’s at. If you’re into monologue, then it really is the same thing as staying at home and still thinking you’ll get the girl.
So I thought I’d focus here on how to present your conversation starter rather than the content per se.
Multimedia engagement is one of the most compelling and interesting ways to start a conversation about something interesting. Just think what’s grabbed your attention online recently. The 30-second TV ad may be as relevant today as monetary policy, but the 300-second roll on the Web is perfect for the niche audience out there with whom you really want to engage and who really wants to know more about what you’ve got.
So what kind of multimedia are we talking? How can we spark the conversation by communicating the really interesting thing we have to say in an interesting way? There’s no formula (that I know of!), but here’s a couple of my favourites to stimulate your “PR 2.0″ synapses, one film and one animation. I’ll follow up this post some time soon with my favourite interactive-game-with-a-point-to-make and call-to-action-social-microsite.
Unfortunately, neither of these examples here direct you to the conversation (other than company name / URL). Imagine however starting a conversation this way, hosting it and then keeping the fire lit.
Film
Here is a film about advertising. (So that’s an interesting choice for a PR consultant.)
First off, it assumes you’re only watching it because you want to, so doesn’t stick to any specific duration, but at the same time keeps the pace up so keeping you 100% glued. It also fits the bill here in giving you other ideas for how to kick-start that conversation.
It’s a conversation starter for sure… and you are going to have to play it more than once or keeping hitting that pause button.
Animation
From Studio aka, a BAFTA-winning animation production company that can do no wrong in my humble opinion, even if serving clients’ perceived needs for half-a-minute or so of prime time advertising is their bread and butter.
Imagine however that your company has a vision, a unique perspective on life with which to explode convention. Now imagine presenting it as beautifully as this. How could your intended conversationalists refuse?
(Click here for Studio aka’s semiotically outstanding communication of BUPA’s reason for being. It’s a shame however that BUPA doesn’t fully appreciate the benefits of social media and prepare the ads for social syndication.)
Add comment February 23rd, 2009
