photo credit: Sh4rp_i

Bruce Nussbaum (LinkedIn, Twitter), a professor at the Parsons School of Design, points out that Facebook inflicted serious damage to its brand identity when HR professionals began scouring Facebook for background on prospects.

My senior students started looking for jobs and watched, horrified, as corporations went on their Facebook pages to check them out. What was once a private, gated community of trusted friends became an increasingly open, public commons of curious strangers.

Nussbaum says Facebook is breaking three cardinal cultural norms:

1. It is taking back a free gift. In order to build profits, Facebook has been commercializing and monetizing friendship networks. What Facebook gave to Millenials, it is now trying to take away. Millennials are resisting the invasion to their privacy.
2. Facebook is ignoring the aging of the Millennials and the subsequent change in their culture. Older Gen Yers want less sociability and more privacy as actors outside their trusted cohort enter the Facebook space in search of information and connection. These older Millennials want more privacy tools for control of their information and networks.
3. Facebook is behaving as though it owned not only its proprietary technology platform but the friendship networks created on it. It doesn’t. Millennials believe that ownership of their networks of friends belongs to them, not Facebook, and resist their commercialization.

You can read his entire essay on the Harvard Business Review.

How Many Will Quit?

One study claims that 60-percent of Facebook users will quit over privacy. With more than 400-million users, that could be close to 240-million users (or, if nationalized, a population slightly smaller than Indonesia). However, there is a vast expanse between mulling a decision to leave and actually pulling the trigger and deleting an active account.

My personal estimate is that Facebook will lose between 1-3 percent next week. Facebook could delete inactive users (users who have not user the service for more than 18 months) and make a bigger dent in the number of accounts than what Quit Facebook Day hopes to accomplish.

None-the-less, Quit Facebook Day has succeeded in raising concerns over privacy and Facebook. Rather than take the hit to their reputation, Facebook has responded.

Do you plan to quit Facebook on Monday? Leave a comment below and explain why or why not.

Apparently, God is worried about Joliet’s independent baseball club, the Jackhammers. Since its inaugural season in 2002, the team has been a loser with declining season ticket sales. One could presume that with God’s help, the Jackhammers will do better. In 2008, the team finished in last place with the worst record in club history (32-63). Only one way to go, as they say.

Maybe a celebrity endorsement will put people in box seats next season.

Invoking the Almighty’s endorsement is a tricky proposition though. It implies resurrection. It sets Biblical expectations for a team that hasn’t finished above .500 in six seasons.

And that is why this billboard is bad marketing.

Religion aside—and maybe the Jackhammers front office is hoping for some good, old-fashioned Bible Thumping controversy with their billboard—why on Earth would you pull such a stunt? My initial reaction was negative even before I picked up my copy of the Baltimore Catechism.

A non-affiliated baseball club thinks so much of itself that they fake an endorsement from God? C’mon. It makes your brand look cheap at best; intolerant at worst.

Stick to family-friendly Inflatable Sumo Wrestlers, guys. It’s the most genuine thing you have when your team under-performs.

Update

The Chicago Tribune writes about this billboard here.

Bob Okon reports the story for the Joliet Herald News here.

The Jackhammers have now placed a poll on their website.  Looks like there publicity stunt is moving in a direction they want.  Now the question is whether or not that will turn the interest into ticket sales.

photo credit: namestartswithj89

Make no mistake, the Comcast-NBCU merger is a content-driven deal. Comcast will take control over programs it distributes through its cable and internet operation, creating an economy of scale that should allow Comcast to command better terms with advertisers.

After the Comcast-NBCU merger, there are few other large-scale mergers that are content deals. The potential sale of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer could attract interest next year, but most of the quick activity will focus on content creators like Scripps Network, the CW, or Discovery Network.

None of these targets are as diverse at NBCU.

Christopher Vollmer, a partner at Booz & Company who specializes in media and entertainment, said M&A activity “is towards higher growth areas such as video games, advertising/marketing services and related technologies, Internet, and, perhaps, the few remaining cable network groups that are not part of a major conglomerate.”

First, however, Comcast must run the regulatory gauntlet. Media mogul John Malone recently told the Associated Press that the deal will give Comcast too much power. While this deal is nothing of the scale that Time and Warner Brothers faced in 1989 with its merger (and ironically, Time Warner is the fourth largest entertainment conglomerate 20 years later), the Federal Trade Commission will be interested in the impact such a merger will have on journalism and national newsgathering.

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts could become a political issue himself as one of the most powerful people in media, overseeing 24-million subscribers of video, voice, and Internet services, theme parks, broadcast and cable networks, and a film studio.

What do you think of this merger? Will it be good or bad for the consumer in the end?

photo credit: lostash

The last time the newspaper industry was in trouble, Congress enacted the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. It allowed newspapers in the same city to share costs through a device called a Joint Operating Agreement, or JOAs. Nearly every ailing newspaper that entered into a JOA has since folded, and only a handful of JOAs remain today.

Congress will be hard-pressed to find an easy solution because, unlike the early 1970s, most cities are a one newspaper town. Newspapers now compete against the Internet. They give their own content away for free in an attempt to compete against business models that don’t purchase ink by the barrel.

One radical idea floating around is an extension of copyright law that will require search engines to pay royalties to newspapers and other content providers. If enacted, look for Google to become a news agency on its own, but I digress.

They key for any business to be successful is to produce a product people want to purchase. Newsgathering is not cheap. To do it well, you have to make the investment. Many newspapers are not, and failing as a result.

When the automobile industry felt the competitive squeeze from Japan in the 1970s, some companies folded. Others filed bankruptcy and developed ways to become competitive. Newspapers must do the same thing or accept the market-place decision that theirs is an irrelevant product as it presently stands.

photo credit: World Economic Forum

As a professional business communicator, my office is anywhere I happen to be. The more resources I have available, the better I can serve my client. I subscribe to services for my Smart Phone that help me keep abreast. If Murdoch plans to move his company into that arena, it will be a positive step.

The big picture is about people who are not in an industry that requires a finger on the pulse. It is about the mass market needs, and there, Murdoch preaches the basics.

• Deliver news people want, when and where they want it
• Convince consumers to pay for news and information online
• Keep the government regulators out of the path of innovation

The Federal Trade Commission wants to put its finger into the information supply chain. The best thing they could do is remove cross-ownership rules governing newspapers and broadcast operations. Protectionist 20^th Century regulatory theory isn’t going to promote innovation, it has (and will continue to) hamper such innovation.

I applaud van Poppel’s move. He and his editors provide a fantastic news service that is global in reach, and as quick as other global news organizations. It is unfortunate that van Poppel turn the service over to MSNBC, an American cable news channel owned by NBC and Microsoft.

[Disclosure: I was a producer at NBC's Television Station Division from 1994-1998.]

I quit reading and watching MSNBC after its coverage of the shooting spree at Virginia Tech in April 2007. MSNBC’s editorial decision to air a video tape “confession” by the gunman struck me as counter to NBC News Policies and Guidelines that were in force at the time. To me, the struggling cable network was more interested in ratings and chose to air a video tape at times on a loop. It brought the gunman additional notoriety and kept the spotlight on him rather than his victims.

As a point of reference, local newspapers and small-town television stations don’t cover suicides for much of the same reason. They don’t want to build their reputation on troubled souls, nor do they want to encourage others looking for their Fifteen Minutes of Fame.

With such a poor decision-making among senior news managers, I have reservations as to whether or not MSNBC will continue van Poppel’s wide-ranging news gathering strategy or, eventually, allow @BreakingNews to become little more than an additional broadcast tool for the struggling cable channel. Perhaps my reservations are unfounded. Regardless, I no longer follow @BreakingNews.

I look forward to the new ventures by van Poppel, and wish him the best.

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of lecturing on Crisis Communications to a Corporate Communication class at the University of St. Francis. Part of my presentation discussed the need to manage expectations. As I finished my presentation, I asked the students who they would fault for the unsuccessful bid by Chicago for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

“Obama,” one student said. Others agreed quickly.

“What about Mayor Daley,” I asked. No takers.

“Oprah?” Still no takers.

“What about the public relations team for the U.S. Olympic Committee?”

The lights started to switch on. “Oh, yeah, managing expectations!”

Back Story: I Want My USOC-TV

In July, 2009, the United States Olympic Committee announced their plan for a cable television channel dedicated solely to the Olympic Movement. The channel, to be carried by Comcast, would program around-the-clock and on-demand content from Olympic and Paralympics Games.

At the time, I expressed my belief that the move made sense.

With the Major League Baseball network earning 20 to 30 cents per subscriber per month, and the National Football League network earning 75 cents to $1.10 per subscriber, it doesn’t surprise me that the United States Olympic Committee plans to enter the cable television market next year.

Now we learn that profit sharing, or rather the lack of profit sharing as the case may be, was at the center of a rift between the U.S. Olympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee. Chicago’s bid might have been a finalist had the Americans been willing to spread the wealth around.

The USOC has been locked in a bitter dispute for years with the IOC over its share of revenues from U.S. TV rights deals and global sponsorship agreements. Based on long-standing contracts, USOC’s share of revenues from these IOC deals has been bigger than all 200-plus other national Olympic committees put together.

The IOC insisted on a revision of these deals at a time when many federations and Olympic committees were feeling the credit crunch, a change the USOC vehemently opposed.

The USOC raised tensions further in August when it announced plans for an Olympic TV network without consulting the IOC. After an angry response from the IOC, the USOC put those plans on hold.

As Deep Throat said in All the President’s Men, “Follow the Money.”

A Poorly Managed Set of Expectations

In the days leading up to the final presentations before the International Olympic Committee, most Americans believed that Chicago would be a finalist. As the decision drew closer and closer, nearly everyone thought that Chicago might even take the prize. The only thing the Chicago bid needed to produce was a personal appeal by the President and the Games were ours.

But Chicago lost in the first round.

The immediate political response was to blame the President, First Lady, Oprah Winfrey, and Mayor Daley. Too much American arrogance, Conservatives shouted. Too much war, Liberals countered.

I say, too much in the way of expectation. And for that, we must blame the people who manage those expectations, the public relations professionals.

Let’s say you’re an attorney on a zoning issue. Tonight, your client’s issue is set for the final vote. If you are worth your salt, you have a feeling, based upon your work with the city’s zoning attorney, whether or not you will get the approval your client seeks. If you believe the petition will be denied, you will manage your client’s expectations. This is something the USOC did not do.

The public relations professionals, especially when the President decided to board Air Force One to make a personal pitch for the Games, should have kicked into overdrive in order to let the American press know that there was a chance of failure.

They should have said, “Hey, look, Chicago’s got a good bid. The President is doing his best to help, but we’re having some problems. Some of the International Committee isn’t happy with us for reasons outside our bid. This isn’t in the bag.”

Had the USOC communicated that simple message, the media wouldn’t have frothed themselves into a lather, and the public wouldn’t have been nearly as perplexed and confused as they were.

The Biggest Public Relations Failure in a Generation

The public relations management of the Chicago 2016 final bid was the biggest public relations failure in a generation. Not only did they allow runaway expectations by the general public, they set up a particularly stunning embarrassment for the President of the United States. I don’t care what your politics are (I am a Republican), as public relations professionals it is our job to mitigate damage to our clients. We don’t set up our CEO for failure. We don’t ignore rumor mills. We backchannel accurate information and help set realistic expectations.

A loss by Chicago would have been less embarrassing had some of the back-story been communicated to the press during the days and weeks before the final bid presentation. The President might have gone to Denmark anyway, but at least he would have been able to say, “I tried, but we knew…”

What are the 1 to 3 concrete action steps organizations can take now to position themselves for success when the economy begins to gather steam?

While I like to view strategy from the marketing perspective, my three action steps don’t take marketing into account at all. Rather, I’m taking a broader view of business.

As we all learn in Macroeconomics, recessions are cyclical. While economists may disagree with the severity or cure for the present down turn, there is one fact most people aren’t taking into account: this is a credit recession, not an inventory recession.

• Inventory Recessions, the most common form of recession, exist because of excessive industrial capacity. Once companies shed the excess, through employee reduction and reducing production, the economy recovers.
• Credit Recessions exist when there is excess credit capacity. Banks lend too easily, interest rates drop to near zero, and consumers shift from consumption to saving in order to retire debt that they might not (or should not) have in the first place. The shift to savings eats a nation’s GDP until the excess credit has been retired or defaulted upon.

Credit Recessions take a long time to work themselves out, even without Capitol Hill’s efforts. Therefore your business needs to consider what it can do to prepare for declining consumption

Stress Working Capital Management

About sixty percent of a typical financial manager’s time is devoted to working capital. This is particularly true in smaller businesses, where most new jobs in the United States are created.

Working capital policy involves two basic questions:

1. What is the optimal amount of each type of current asset for the firm to carry?
2. How should current asset holdings be financed?

One tactic is to monitor accounts receivable in order to lower DSO (Days Sales Outstanding). Another tactic might focus upon excess Free Cash Flow, the cash flow available for payments to investors after a company has made investments in fixed assets, new products, or working capital required to sustain ongoing operations.

Target Lean Opportunities

Service processes are slow because there is far too much work-in-process, often the result of unnecessary complexity in the service (product) offering. When there is too much work-in-process, work can spend more than 90-percent of its time waiting, which does not help your customers at all and, in fact, creates or inflicts substantial waster (non-value-add costs) in the process.

Succession Planning

In Recruiting and Selection, I explained how companies around the world, and regardless of business discipline, fail to develop written succession plans that, in the words of the South China Morning Post, “provides for the continued operation of a business in the event that the owner leaves the company, retires, or dies.”

A survey by the Journal of Accountancy in 1997 revealed that 253 top executives failed to choose a successor. Similarly, the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants found that thirty percent of small-business closures in Britain were the direct result of a lack of an effective succession plan.

Whether senior staff members leave voluntarily or not, there always will be transition. You may not be in control of the timing or circumstances, nor could the change be convenient for the business. But it will come. Therefore, eventuality necessitates the development of a succession plan.

Highlights

As conventions go, there was a great celebratory atmosphere throughout the event. Illinois credit unions have managed through a very tough economic year, which is cause enough to celebrate.

I was really impressed with the camaraderie and welcoming atmosphere of the convention-goers.

The educational sessions were good. I especially enjoyed the Legislative Update and the session on Succession Planning. I also appreciated the down time rather than schedule things back-to-back.

Recommendations

The sessions on the Role of the Board was a bit too elementary for most in attendance. I believe a session on strategic planning would have been more interesting, but that is my focus as I chair such a committee.

Another recommendation concerns the Chicago Hilton and Towers. For the cost of the convention, hotel room, and other direct expenses, was it really necessary to pay $43 to self-park? I also thought the $14.99 per day charge for basic WiFi access was a bit excessive (but that is a hotel issue, not one for ICUL).

If you went to the convection, please take a moment to jot your ideas down as a comment.

See you next year!