Print press not dead

This is an English translation of a post written in French. Original post with links here.

The news got plenty of coverage in the press yesterday but not much commentary online so far. Maybe it’s not to every blogger’s liking: the Audipresse 2007 survey, which measures the audience of the printed press, shows that it fared better in 2007. Regardless of what people have been saying – including here.

The audience of every French daily has increased, save La Croix (catholic) and L’Equipe (sports). Libération grew most: 10%. Free paper 20 Minutes now has France’s highest readership: 2.5 million. L’Equipe, Le Monde, Le Parisien – Aujourd’hui, Métro and 20 Minutes all have audiences in excess of 2 million people.

Most magazines also achieved an increase in audience. Some of the best performances were by Challenges (up 10%), Marianne (16%), Public (11%), Cosmopolitan (15%), Management (20%) and Studio (16%). Both news and business magazines did well, increasing their readership by 6.5% and 5.6% respectively.

This improvement, averaging 1.9% for dailies and 1.2% for magazines, follows a long decline since 2000, the best year for the printed press. No such figures have been recorded in the past ten years, the Audipresse survey shows. The chart below shows the change in total paid consumer press circulation between 1996 and 2006, measured by the OJD.

Change over 10 years
Paid circulation in France
1996 = 100

Note: The Audipresse survey measures the audience (number of readers), while OJD measures circulation (sales and free distribution).

But how is this possible when we keep hearing about the revolution in the media landscape, the switch to online media consumption, etc.?

The comments published since yesterday do not offer much in the way of an explanation. There is of course the increased interest due to the presidential elections, which made 2007 an exceptional year. But that would not explain the improvement in some press categories that do not deal with political news. Nor can it fully explain the increased audience in the second half of the year, after the elections.

Some read into it the result of smart editorial policies that use the online versions of newspapers and magazines not so much to steal readers from the printed counterpart as to draw attention to it. Le Figaro wrote: “Contrary to the preconceived notion, the Internet does not hurt the printed press. Web addicts are the most avid readers of magazines. Those who are connected every day read 16% more than average.”

A new debate is open: is this a conjecture or a trend? Just a step on the printed press’ ladder down to oblivion? Or the beginning of the rebound? Does the Internet ring the death toll of other media or does it stimulate a broader appetite for information?

We sure won’t answer that one today. On the one hand, I’m sure the readership of printed media will not drop below a given threshold – and we have “predicted” here the return of journalism.

But I’m a bit doubtful about the theory that the Internet strengthens interest in information in general and therefore in the printed press. It may be so. But my intuition is that the sum of time spent on the Internet and reading periodicals is not extensible. The part of conjecture in the Audipresse figures deserves to be properly assessed.

We look forward to the publication of the OJD report for 2007 and the exact circulation figures for each periodical. A preview on the OJD website seems to confirm overall the trend announced by Audipresse: many circulation figures for 2007 are up. But we still need the full report to understand the change for each category of press.

A few observations, in no particular order:
• This survey also reveals a generally stable level of trust in the media.
• According to TNS Media Intelligence, advertising is matching the trend in audience (up 2.3%)
• The printed media remains the mass media, unsurprisingly. The daily papers have a penetration rate of 46% and magazines 59%.

• We discussed media on the move during the debate at Six35 on the future of the media. The table below, also from the Audipresse EPIQ survey, shows that the free papers are a favourite during travel time. Could that explain its good performance (audience up 6.6%)?

“Places for reading
The daily press is mostly read at home, but also at work. Free papers are mostly read during transportation, but also at home and work.”

Out of 100 readers monitored

• Periodicals’ financial difficulties remain acute.
• Finally, among the survey’s takeaways, comparing the audience and the circulation shows how many people read the same copy. A quick check in an Excel spreadsheet reveals that the rate is 3 to 3.5 for free papers, 4.5 for Les Echos and La Tribune. While each copy of Le Monde attracts 5.7 readers, Le Figaro only gets passed around among 3.5 people. So even though Le Figaro’s circulation beats Le Monde’s, the latter’s audience is almost twice as high (2 million vs. 1.2 million).

Will swap ten online marketers for one Duncan Watts

An article in Fast Company, “Is the Tipping Point Toast?”, looks at the work of Duncan Watts, author of Six Degrees and without a doubt one of the top experts on the matters of web networks and influence.

Aside from presenting and discussing his university research and his work at Yahoo!, Duncan Watts has a go at online marketers, the preachers who chant the gospel of the new prophets, the “e-fluentials”.

Investing in viral communication and making it a priority is a big mistake, Watts insists throughout his article. For two key reasons:

1.    “e-fluentials” do not always influence. Undoubtedly some are opinion leaders, it would be foolish to deny it. But it would be even more foolish to believe they influence everything and everywhere. Opinion leadership does not necessarily imply influence. Moreover, solutions such as panels of influentials have been proven ineffective by 50 years of marketing studies: not easy to be a leader in more than five types of products or lines of business. So is it reasonable to invest in a viral campaign that one does not fully control?

2.    the world is too complex. Duncan Watts points to the anarchy of social networks. There can be no model for viral communication and information dissemination. So is it reasonable to invest in a campaign that one is sure one cannot control at all?

So goes my poor summary of his views. I recommend taking a look at the original article and the – quite conventional – marketing mix recommended by Duncan Watts. And here are a few extra thoughts from yours truly.

•    even when one influences online, the influence does not necessarily spread offline. The on/offline articulation has not been explored by research on the issue.
•    France’s marketing professionals seem to have their eyes glued on the US. The examples I hear and read about are all American. And yet there are great cultural subtleties in these kinds of matters – take a look at food as a vehicle for socialisation, for instance. The results of transpositions from the US should be taken with a pinch of salt. French marketeers and strategists are rather short-sighted about the characteristics of their own audience: the French.

Finally, I recommend reading Fred Cavazza’s post and comments, which are very insightful. Readers might hear echoes of a tune hummed regularly in these pages by our own soloist, François Guillot.

2007 retrospective: a year on the Internet

This is an English translation of a post written in French. The original article - and the external links it contains - are here.

Ceci est une traduction d’un billet rédigé en français. Le billet original et les liens qu’il contient sont ici.

Here’s my personal diary of last year’s top web-related events in France and abroad.

January
Thierry Crouzet publishes Le Cinquième Pouvoir (≈ The Fifth Estate). It’s one of just a handful of essays on the new forms of participation powered by the Internet.

Coca-Cola spends more than a quarter of its marketing budget for Coca-Cola Zero’s launch online: the record for major launches in early 2007.

February
David Neeleman, founder and CEO of jetBlue, uses YouTube to speak directly to his customers following the airline’s worst crisis ever. This video, “Our Promise to You”, will remain a landmark in the history of online crisis communication.

DailyMotion, YouTube and skyblogs help a new dance craze take over France’s clubs and streets: Tecktonik.

March
After seeing sales decline, sensationalist news magazine Choc enjoys a huge buzz on the web when viral marketing agency Buzzman designed a campaign based on a fake video showing a look-alike of star TV show presenter Jean-Luc Delarue losing it during a plane trip.

Summize, a new model of online “trending” marketing, goes live. No sign of a French equivalent yet.

Online campaigning is going full blast, with politicians experimenting with the many opportunities offered by the Internet. Some even invest in Second Life. Online versions of conventional media keep adding more interactivity to their websites.

April
Iconic US magazine Life stops printing. It will only be available online.

Consolidation in online advertising: Google acquires DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. A month later, Microsoft buys aQuantive for 6 billion dollars.

May
Steve Jobs announces a measure to make Apple greener: it’s the outcome of nine months of online lobbying by Greenpeace through the GreenMyApple website.

Unlike with the referendum on the European Constitution, the results of the presidential elections only moderately reflect the online debate.

Launch on May 6 of Rue89.com, the first experiment in France with “hybrid journalism”. Former Libération journos manage contributions from non-professionals. Six months later, Rue89 is already famous for several scoops and has almost a million visitors per month. Other projects like Lepost.fr (part of Le Monde group) and MediaPart follow the same model.

Facebook lets its members freely develop online applications and collect all the income from them. This kicks off a surge that makes Facebook the Internet phenomenon of 2007, establishing a new form of relationship between individuals and besting MySpace, Second Life, Twitter and so forth.

June
15 million viewers in ten days checked whether President Sarkozy was really drunk at the G8 summit. A surprising buzz for a video that was actually quite uneventful.

After twelve years, the famous show Arrêt sur Images, which analysed TV coverage of events, is taken off the air. After some controversy peppered with petitions, presenter Daniel Schneidermann and his team moves out and prepares a comeback on the web.

The German media group Springer takes a 40% stake in Aufeminin.com, France’s leading online women’s magazine, bringing its stock value to €284 million. That’s €44 million more than what LVMH’s CEO Bernard Arnault will pay in November for France’s number one business daily, Les Echos.

July
Agoravox launches its first participative survey, a new experience in coordinated collective intelligence. This first is dedicated to vaccination.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau reports a 40% increase e-advertising spend. France’s train operator SNCF remains the biggest online advertiser. Almost 11% of advertising spend in France goes online: it’s the only advertising channel enjoying real growth.

August
Rather discretely, Google becomes a publisher, announcing the possibility for stakeholders to comment on Google News items that refer to them. A solution used at Google News US – and only moderately.

An American student, Virgil Griffith, puts a new tool online: Wikiscanner. It lets any Internet user track back to their source the anonymous changes to Wikipedia articles. Many political parties, companies and public figures are caught red-handed.

British students change HSBC policy by networking online: their Facebook petition gathered thousands of signatures and made the bank reverse its decision to increase overdraft penalties.

September
Chanel rolls out an impressive blogger campaign.

The New York Times.com, the world’s most visited website, drops its subscription model and allows everyone to access all its content for free – betting on an increase in advertising income.

It’s the year of the widget. UPS spends most of its 2007 online and offline advertising budget on promoting its desktop companion: probably one of the most ambitious and daring campaigns for a web service (designed by McCann Erickson).

October
After the considerable buzz of its Evolution campaign, with denounced the manipulation of images, Dove comes back with an attack on the beauty industry in its new video Onslaught. A bit rich, some say, considering that Dove is owned by Unilever… which also owns brands practicing the kind of communication attacked by Onslaught.

No more label, no more outlets: Radiohead uses the Internet as the only sales channel for their latest album, In Rainbows. The band asks web users to pay the price that seems right to them. But how many artists can afford to do this?

Géo magazine introduces its webdocumentaries: a success that illustrates the increasing integration of online images and the phenomenon of web TVs.

More than just a buzz on the web, it’s a real phenomenon: the Martine Cover Generator attracts thousands of jolly users who created parodies of the popular children’s books series Martine, just by changing the title on the cover. Until Martine’s publisher Casterman asks for the website to shut down a month later.

Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo joins a bloggers’ meeting during the consultation process on the environment.

Microsoft takes a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 million and announces profiled advertising.

November
A spam email from BETC Euro RSCG to Laurent Gloaguen, part of an eBay PR campaign targeting bloggers, sparks a huge outcry on the web and triggers another debate on the relationship between brands and blogs.

Pointblog, the blogging magazine, shuts down. The audience and the rhythm of publication were too low to attract enough advertising. Gilles Klein continues with Le Monde du Blog.

IPSOS’ annual survey in Australia reports a strong aversion of Internet users to advertising.

Denis Olivennes, the CEO of music, books & electronics retailer FNAC, gets both the arts industry and Internet access providers to agree to his suggestion for thwarting music and video piracy: cut off the offenders’ Internet access.

The iPhone marks the true beginning of mobile Internet.

December
Publisher Robert Laffont announces the end of the paper version of the Quid encyclopaedia. The annual publication is made redundant by the massive online availability of information (and probably by Wikipedia in particular).

Things seem a bit slow at Web3, the international congress for bloggers and all kinds of entrepreneurs in Paris. Nothing much new in terms of content, but still a place to be for networking.

Facebook reaches the million member mark in France.

Skyblog was popular, now it’s also profitable. Skyrock announces that it earns more online than with its radio station.

The publication of swimmer Laure Manaudou’s pictures naked set the web on fire (with a record number of searches for Laure + Manaudou + Naked). But swift action by the athlete’s lawyers gets the pictures offline and demonstrates that the Internet may no longer be the legal no-man’s-land people believe.

10 reasons why PR provides the best online communication

(This is an English translation of a French post. Original -with links- here)

(Ceci est une traduction d’un post en français. Original -avec les liens- ici)

For some time I’ve been meaning to write a little note outlining the benefits of online PR. So here we go, with this catchy title: ten reasons why we PR professionals provide the smartest online service

Based on the customer’s objectives (generating traffic or sales, enhancing public image, etc.), the ten reasons are:

1. “Eyeballs” dodge online advertising. They go straight to the content. Eye-tracking surveys are astonishing in this respect. Moreover, refer to the Ipsos Australia study of November 15: “Internet users becoming adverse to advertising”.

2. Content cannot be purchased. Not without taking a serious risk.

3. Free advertising from “the buzz” is more of a myth than anything else.

4. It turns out, the Internet is not a mass media. It is made up of a set of affinity networks know as – exaggeratedly – “communities”. The Web is a highly decentralised realm, in which one needs to identify opinion leaders and know how to address them. According to Arthur Kannas, founder of the Heaven agency:

“Our vision takes the decentralised nature of the Web as its starting point. We believe it is better to teach brands to take into account all the places where their consumers are, rather than make them spend a lot of money to take them to a single place, for instance a brand website.”

5. User-generated content is credible. The brand is not alone in expressing itself, audiences gain a share of voice.

6. To address audiences effectively, one needs non-intrusive, interactive, personalised and sincere relations. Bad practices create bad noise.

7. Search engines have become reputation management systems. They only offer up “official” information as one of many sources, so it’s better to generate coverage than be subjected to it.

8. Take a look at the tips for website referencing suggested by online experts: their leitmotiv is always the quality of the content.

9. Even a purely technical reading of referencing criteria take us back to good PR practices. In particular, incoming links are an important factor – and what’s the best way of generating incoming links if not… a PR campaign?

10. Web-writing is not so specific. What’s important is… writing well.

It is quite clear that “PR lives”. Of course, everything I say refers to good PR. The kind that respects its audiences and follows Seth Godin’s brilliant rule:

“So, the smart PR folks (the successful ones) struggle to make their lists smaller and smaller. The lazy ones just try to make them bigger.”

Understanding audiences on the Internet: the geographer and the ethnologist

(This is an English translation of a French post. Original here.)

(Ceci est une traduction d’un post en français. Original ici.)

When an organisation wishes to reach out to its audiences on the Internet, it faces many questions, critical ones. Even more so than with “conventional” communication, the online jungle requires the source of information to understand its environment. Who am I addressing? What are their codes? How do they see us? What do they expect from me? Who influences them?

The Internet therefore puts a new emphasis on understanding rather than acting; it places analysis at the very heart of the communication consultant’s role. No online PR strategy can do without this phase, which is often called “cartography” and enables an organisation to understand its “natural” online environment (which communities? On which subjects?). It’s the crucial Stage 1 of any PR strategy – it cannot be skipped even in the greatest of hurries.

This is where we are faced with several stakes. The Internet’s complexity, its almost endless surface, its complete decentralisation make it tempting to “automate” the analysis of audiences. Press a button to get the answer to the question: “Who are my audiences?” The financial imperative encourages this reflex: “There must be an engine that will tell me all this.”
And indeed, we need engines. This is the approach we could call geographic. It’s what a company like RTGI (note the G for geography) does with panache. You might know its impressive work on the European constitution referendum or its observatory of the presidential elections. The geographer maps out audiences. In the online jungle, he shows the paths. The map may be automated or hand-drawn according to specific needs (as i&e does it).

But to understand one’s environment, one must team up an ethnologist with the geographer. In the jungle, a map is not enough. You need a guide: the ethnologist, the one who studied the populations, their customs, and who will guide you in the field, speaking the language of the locals. This work of ethnology can only be conducted from the inside.

In my view, someone like Laurent Javault, a well-connected blogger who knows the various types of audiences and opinion-leaders, has the profile of a “blog ethnologist”. And when we tell our clients that to understand the web, they need to dive in (i.e. read blogs, read the comments, use an aggregator, read the history of Wikipedia entries, etc.), that’s exactly what we mean. It sounds basic, but we still repeat it: you cannot understand your audiences without studying them.

The duo of geographer and ethnologist gets us through the jungle. It would be wrong to think their fields are over-specialised. With the Internet more and more accessible, ethnology in particular is everyone’s business. PR consultants and press officers, who were the ethnologists of the conventional media, are increasingly becoming online ethnologists as well. No need to be a pure player or a geek to understand a particular online community: it’s enough to get started and participate. I see a kind of “de-expertisation” of online communication consulting, which has major implications for PR agencies. The Internet is increasingly everyone’s business and not the birthright of a lucky few who know it all. All thanks to the geographer and the ethnologist.

Using Wikipedia in Corporate Communications

(This is an English translation of a paper written for “le Journal du Net” originally published here)

(Ceci est une traduction d’une tribune initialement parue dans le Journal du Net).

It was bound to happen: a few months ago, Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales threatened to block all PR agencies from contributing to the interactive encyclopedia.

Why the big fuss? It is pretty obvious. Wikipedia, the web-based, free content encyclopedia, follows the rules of voluntary collaboration. Anyone can add or edit an entry, without any prior check or validation. As its popularity surges, Wikipedia is fast becoming a synonym for quick information retrieval, its articles appearing at the top of many search results.

An online reference, free to use and free to modify: all the ingredients are reunited for a time bomb in the world of communications.

A new PR tool

But why ban PR agencies from contributing when, by definition, this encyclopaedia is open to all? Jimmy Wales’ position first appears to be paradoxical. In fact, it casts a new light on the Web 2.0 and is very useful to those hoping to leverage its potential in their PR work.

In a nutshell, Jimmy Wales is arguing that Wikipedia is incompatible with any commercial endeavour. While PR aims to promote, Wikipedia aims for neutrality. Standing firm against all private interests, the website offers general points of view. No room for announcements here, this is an encyclopedia.

Wikipedia’s collaborative universe cannot be compared to conventional media. Jimmy Wales is asking us to acknowledge this difference. PR agencies cannot and should not apply their usual methods to Wikipedia. Quite to the contrary: they should develop a new and different capability: advising and writing properly for Wikipedia.

A few rules for Wikipedia writing

Can Wikipedia’s positioning and business objectives converge? Of course they can, as long as a few rules of conduct, ethics and common sense are respected.

1. Neutrality: marketing messages, whether placed directly in an entry or in a link, are not welcome in Wikipedia. The community of active contributors that “regulates” the website sees to it that they are removed.

2. Transparency: modifications to a page must be substantiated, so discussions can be held in the comments section. A company wishing to contribute should open a Wikipedia account, which will demonstrate its willingness to communicate openly. Though it may be tempting to remain anonymous, it should be remembered that IP addresses are easy to trace.

3. Involvement: the best way to gain respect from Internet users is to play entirely by the rules of the encyclopedia, rather than post a plain text. Internal and external links to additional relevant and neutral content are highly regarded.

These rules are by no means naïve or angelic. They derive from the reasonable and effective use of Wikipedia and – more generally – from the nature of the Web 2.0. The whole system raises further issues, such as the thin line between neutral information and commercial messaging. Businesses have a lot to gain from careful consideration of Wikipedia’s rules and recommendations. When they embrace these principles and verify the legitimacy of their own communication activities, they speak the language of the Web 2.0 and greatly increase their chances of spreading their point of view.

In the end, though “Wikipedia speak” may seem miles away from the usual practices of PR consultancies, there is no reason to presume them guilty. PR consultants can write in a spirit of neutrality and embrace the culture of Wikipedia. And by doing so, they strengthen their role as advisors.