Business

This LinkedIn sayonara message says it all.

Phillip Nones Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Education, Employment, Human Resources, Marketing Research, Media, Media Consumption, Social Media , , , , , , ,

Over the past several years, it’s been painfully evident to me as well as many other people that LinkedIn has become a sort of Potemkin Village regarding its professional groups.

While many groups boast enviable membership levels, there’s been precious little going on with them.

It’s almost as if the vast majority of people who signed up for membership in these groups did so only to be “seen” as being active in them – without really caring at all about actually interacting with other members.

And if any more proof were needed, try advertising your product or brand on LinkedIn.

Crickets.

Today I received the following message from Alex Clarke, digital content manager and moderator of the B2B Marketing LinkedIn group. You know them:  publishers of B2B Marketing, one of the most well-respected media properties in the marketing field.

We’ll let the Alex Clarke memo speak for itself:

What ever happened to LinkedIn Groups? What was once a bustling metropolis, teeming with valuable discussion and like-minded peers sharing success and insight has now become a desolate, post-apocalyptic wasteland – home only to spammers and tumbleweed. 

We’re sad, because, like many other groups, our 70,000+ strong LinkedIn community has become a stagnant place, despite constant love and attention and our best efforts to breathe life into its lonely corridors. 

That’s why we’re moving to a new home … Facebook: bit.ly/B2BGroupFB. 

We’re aiming to build a similar – and ultimately, better – community on this platform, with an eye on providing B2B marketers with a place to seek advice, share success, and connect with like-minded professionals in a well-moderated environment. 

We’ll still drop in to keep an eye on the LinkedIn Group, continuing to moderate discussions and approve new members, but much of our effort will be invested in building a brand-new community on Facebook. Many of you will already know each other, but please feel free to say hello!  We’re really excited to see where this goes, thanks for coming along with us.

So, while B2B Marketing will maintain a default presence on LinkedIn, what’s clear is that it’s abandoning that social platform in favor of one where it feels it will find more success.

Who knows if Facebook will ultimately prove the better fit for professional interaction. On the face of it, LinkedIn would seem better-aligned for the professional world as compared to the “friends / family / hobbies / virulent politics / cat videos” orientation of Facebook.

Time will tell, of course.

Either way, this is a huge indictment of LinkedIn and its failure to build a presence in the cyberworld that goes beyond being a shingle for newly minted “business consultants,” or a place for people to park their resumes until the time comes when they’re ready to seek a new job.

It’s quite a disappointment, actually.

Business owners give the lowdown on workplace — and their own — productivity.

Phillip Nones Business, Employment, Employment, Human Resources, Sales , , , , , ,

The owner of a business is arguably the single most important employee on the payroll. As such, the findings from a recent survey of business owners conducted by The Alternative Board are revealing.

According to the survey, which was conducted in May 2017, the typical business owner reports having only about 1.5 hours of uninterrupted, high-productive time per day.

Four in five of the business owners reported that they feel most productive in the mornings. It stands to reason, then, that nearly nine in ten respondents reported that they prefer to get the most important tasks of the day out of the way first.

The majority of respondents reported that they are most productive working from the office, but nearly one-third of them reported that most of their work is done from their home.

A majority of the respondents also reported that they spend the biggest block of their daily time on e-mail activities.  Tellingly, less than 10% feel that this is the most important use of their time.

Asked to report on what factors are working against their employees achieving a high level of productivity in the owner’s business, these following four factors were named most frequently:

  • Poor time management: ~35% of survey respondents cited
  • Poor communications: ~25%
  • Personal/personnel problems: ~18%
  • Technology distractions: ~16%

Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that while there are certainly issues that affect business productivity, business owners have it within their power to improve time management, foster better communication between employees, and ultimately run a tighter ship.

More findings from the TAB research can be found on this infographic.

Legislators tilt at the digital privacy windmill (again).

Phillip Nones Business, Government, Security, Social Media , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the effort to preserve individual privacy in the digital age, hope springs eternal.

The latest endeavor to protect individuals’ privacy in the digital era is legislation introduced this week in the U.S. Senate that would require law enforcement and government authorities to obtain a warrant before accessing the digital communications of U.S. citizens.

Known as the ECPA Modernization Act of 2017, it is bipartisan legislation introduced by two senators known for being polar opposites on the political spectrum: Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on the left and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) on the right.

At present, only a subpoena is required for the government to gain full access to Americans’ e-mails that a over 180 days old. The new ECPA legislation would mean that access couldn’t be granted without showing probable cause, along with obtaining a judge’s signature.

The ECPA Modernization Act would also require a warrant for accessing geo-location data, while setting new limits on metadata collection. If the government did access cloud content without a warrant, the new legislation would make that data inadmissible in a court of law.

There’s no question that the original ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act) legislation, enacted in 1986, is woefully out of date. After all, it stems from a time before the modern Internet.

It’s almost quaint to realize that the old ECPA legislation defines any e-mail older than 180 days as “abandoned” — and thereby accessible to government officials.  After all, we now live in an age when many residents keep the same e-mail address far longer than their home address.

The fact is, many individuals have come to rely on technology companies to store their e-mails, social media posts, blog posts, text messages, photos and other documents — and to do it for an indefinite period of time. It’s perceived as “safer” than keeping the information on a personal computer that might someday malfunction for any number of reasons.

Several important privacy advocacy groups are hailing the proposed legislation and urging its passage – among them the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Sophia Cope, an attorney at EFF, notes that the type of information individuals have entrusted to technology companies isn’t very secure at all. “Many users do not realize that an e-mail stored on a Google or Microsoft service has less protection than a letter sitting in a desk drawer at home,” Cope maintains.

“Users often can’t control how and when their whereabouts are being tracked by technology,” she adds.

The Senate legislation is also supported by the likes of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter.

All of which makes it surprising that this type of legislation – different versions of which have been introduced in the U.S. Senate every year since 2013 – has had such trouble gaining traction.

The reasons for prior-year failure are many and varied – and quite revealing in terms of illuminating how crafting legislation is akin to sausage-making.  Which is to say, not very pretty.  But this year, the odds look more favorable than ever before.

Two questions remain on the table: First, will the legislation pass?  And second, will it really make a difference in terms of protecting the privacy of Americans?

Any readers with particular opinions are encouraged to weigh in.

Programmatic ad buying takes a hit.

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Content Creation and Content Management, Marketing Communications, Marketing Research, Media, Media Consumption, Publishing , , , , , ,

There are some interesting new trends we’re now seeing in programmatic ad buying. For years, purchasing online ads programmatically instead of directly with specific publishers or media companies has been on a steady increase.  No more.

MediaRadar has just released its latest Consumer Advertising Report covering ad spending, formats and buying patterns. The new report states that programmatic ad buying declined ~12% when comparing the first quarter of 2017 to the same period in 2016.

More specifically, whereas ~45,000 advertisers purchased advertising programmatically in Q1 2016, that figure has dropped to around ~39,500 for the same quarter this year.

This change in fortunes may come as a surprise to some. The market has generally been bullish on programmatic ad buying because it is far less labor-intensive to administrator those types of programs compared to direct advertising programs.

There have been ongoing concerns about the potential of fraud, the lack of transparency on ad pricing, and control over where advertisers’ placements actually appear, but up until now, these concerns weren’t strong enough to reverse the steady migration to programmatic buying.

Todd Krizelman, CEO of MediaRadar, had this to say about the new findings:

“For many years, the transition of dollars from direct ad buying to programmatic seemed inevitable, and impossible to roll back. But the near-constant drumbeat of concern over brand safety and fraud in the first six months of 2017 has slowed the tide.  There’s more buying of direct advertising, especially sponsored editorial, and programmatically there is a ‘flight to quality’.”

Krizelman touches on another major new finding from the MediaRadar report: how much better native advertising performs over traditional ad units. Audiences tend to look at advertorials more frequently than display ads, and the clickthrough rates on mobile native advertising, in particular, are running four times higher than what mobile display ads garner.

Not surprisingly, the top market categories for native advertising are ones which lend themselves well to short, pithy stories. Travel, entertainment, home, food and apparel categories score well, as do financial and real estate stories.

The MediaRadar report is based on some pretty exhaustive statistics, with data analyzed from more than 265,000 advertisers covering the buying of digital, native, mobile, video, e-mail and print advertising. For more detailed findings, follow this link.

Chipping away at the opposition, a Wisconsin company plans to implant its employees with microchips.

Phillip Nones Business, Employment, Human Resources, Marketing , , , , , , , ,

I’ve blogged before about how micro-chipping has been morphing from appliances and pets to people.

But not without opposition.  Earlier this year, it was reported that lawmakers the state of Nevada had introduced legislation that would make it a felony to require a person to be implanted with microchips such as an RFID (radio frequency identification) or NFC (near field communication) devices.

Nevada isn’t the only state legislature to take up the issue, as similar legislation has already been passed in North Dakota, Oklahoma, Virginia, Wisconsin and – how come we are not surprised? – California.

But now comes word that at least one company is quite publicly thumbing its nose at the state of Wisconsin by offering implanted chip technology to all of its employees.

Beginning in August, River Falls-based Three Square Market (32M) will be implanting all willing employees with an RFID chip. Reportedly, this will allow these employees to purchase items in the company’s break room, as well as to log on to computers, open locked doors on the company premises, and to use copy machines.

[For those who may not know, River Falls is located near the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and is also home to one of the University of Wisconsin’s more notable tech campuses.]

As many as 50 employees of 32M are expected to participate in the scheme, in what is claimed to be the first employee micro-chipping program implemented in the United States.

As it turns out, there’s a little more than just altruism behind 32M’s program. The company operates in a market segment that’s naturally aligned with chip technology.

More specifically, 32M is a key player in the so-called “micro market” – also known as the break room market — wherein mini-convenience store kiosks that are installed in employee break rooms feature self-checkout functionality.

32M sells micro market technology, while operating more than 2,000 kiosks in 20 countries around the world.

According to Tony Danna, 32M’s vice president of sales, one of the reasons for embarking on the microchip implantations is his company’s desire to have first-hand experience working with the technology, which it offers in addition to more conventional RFID payment solutions such as rings and wrist bands.

In other words, it isn’t a “forced march.”  And while 32M is at it, the company is getting more than its share of publicity out of the gambit.

Mr. Danna pushes back against the notion that microchips and the data they contain are an invasion of privacy, insisting that the microchips are not trackable and “anyone can pop it out, like a splinter.”

Of course, credit card information can be stored on the chip — and likely a whole lot more.

Despite any reservations that recalcitrant employees – or state legislators in Wisconsin – might have, 32M is moving ahead and planning for a “chip party” at the company’s headquarters in early August.

No word if any other kinds of chips – such as of the corn or potato variety – plan to be served up as well during the event.

Chief Marketing Officers and the revolving door.

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Employment, Human Resources, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Research , , , , , , , , , ,

If it seems to you that chief marketing officers last only a relatively short time in their positions, you aren’t imagining things.

The reality is, of all of the various jobs that make up senior management positions at many companies, personnel in the chief marketing officer position are the most likely to be changed most often.

To understand why, think of the four key aspects of marketing you learned in business school: Product-Place-Price-Promotion.

Now, think about what’s been happening in recent times to the “4 Ps” of the marketing discipline. In companies where there are a number of “chief” positions – chief innovation officers, chief growth officers, chief technology officers, chief revenue officers and the like – those other positions have encroached on traditional marketing roles to the extent that in many instances, the CMO no longer has clear authority over them.

It’s fair to say that of the 4 Ps, the only one that’s still the clear purview of the CMO is “Promotion.”

… Which means that the chief marketing officer is more accurately operating as a chief advertising officer.

Except … when it comes to assigning responsibility (or blame, depending on how things are going), the chief marketing officer still gets the brunt of that attention.

“All the responsibility with none of the authority” might be overstating it a bit, but one can see how the beleaguered marketing officer could be excused for thinking precisely that when he or she is in the crosshairs of negative attention.

Researcher Debbie Qaqish at The Pedowitz Group, who is also author of the book The Rise of the Revenue Marketer, reports that as many as five C-suite members typically share growth and revenue responsibility inside a company … but the CMO is often the one held responsible for any missed targets.

With organizational characteristics like these, it’s no wonder the average CMO tenure is half that of a CEO (four years versus eight). Research findings as reported by Neil Morgan and Kimberly Whitler in the pages of the July 2017 issue of the Harvard Business Review give us that nice little statistic.

What to do about these issues is a tough nut. There are good reasons why many traditional marketing activities have migrated into different areas of the organization.  But it would be nice if company organizational structures and operational processes would keep pace with that evolution instead of staying stuck in the paradigm of how the business world operated 10 or 20 years ago.

Rapid change is a constant in the business world, and it’s always a challenge for companies to incorporate changing responsibilities into an existing organizational structure.  But if companies want to have CMOs stick around long enough to do some good, a little more honesty and fairness about where true authority and true responsibility exist would seem to be in order.

Employee churn rates underscore the volatile nature of e-mail contact databases.

Phillip Nones Business, Direct Marketing, Employment, Human Resources, Marketing, Marketing Communications, Marketing Research, Social Media , , , , , ,

Most marketers are well-familiar with the challenges of e-mail list maintenance. In the business-to-business world in particular, e-mail databases can become pretty stale pretty quickly, due to the horizontal and vertical movement of employees inside organizations as well as jumping to other companies.

Whether they’re moving up or out, often they’re no longer good prospects.

Based on my experience, my personal rule of thumb has been that approximately one-fifth of any given list of B-to-B names will “churn” within a 12-month period, meaning that any such contact database will rapidly lose its effectiveness unless assiduously maintained.

And now we have a new report from Salesforce Research that confirms this basic rule of thumb.

Salesforce looked to LinkedIn, exploring this social platform’s data from more than 7 million records over a 48-month period to gauge the lifecycle of the typical “persona.”

The research considered not only changes that result in the deactivation of an e-mail address, but also circumstances where individuals may keep the same e-mail address but still should be removed as a target because a horizontal or vertical change within the same organization places them in a different employee function.

What the new research found was that the average annual B-to-B churn rate for such “personas” is ~17%.

That figure turns out to be fairly close to my basic rule of thumb based on years of observing not only e-mail contact databases, but also the postal mail databases we’ve worked with in my company or with our clients.

Beyond the broad average, there are some small but meaningful differences in the B-to-B churn rate depending on the product focus and on the type of employee function.

In high-tech fields, the average annual churn rate is higher than the average. And it’s across the board, too:  23% churn in marketing … 20% in sales and in HR personnel … 19% in IT, and 18% in finance.

People employed in the retail and consumer products industries also clock in at or higher than the overall churn average, but the annual churn rate is a tad lower in the medical and transportation fields.

Another interesting finding from the Salesforce evaluation is that annual churn rates are somewhat lower than the average for personnel at director levels and higher in companies (around 15%). For managers, the churn rate matches the overall average, while “worker bees” have a higher churn rate averaging around 20%.

Considering the critical importance of e-mail marketing efforts in the B-to-B environment, Salesforce’s finding that it takes only 4.2 years for an e-mail database to churn completely means that the value of these marketing assets will decline dramatically unless cultivated and maintained on an ongoing basis.

The volatile nature of e-mail contact databases also helps explain why so many companies have adopted a multi-channel approach to marketing, including interacting on social media platforms. Yes, those platforms do have their place in the B-to-B world …

The full report of the Salesforce findings can be downloaded here.

Brands tiptoe through today’s political minefields.

Phillip Nones Branding, Business, Social Commentary, Social Media , , , , , ,

In 2017, not only is the United States politically divided into nearly equal camps, but it seems as though the gulf between the two sides is wider than it’s been in decades.

In my own personal experience, I haven’t witnessed political rifts this big since the anti-war era of the late 1960s and early 1970s.  But even then, that divide wasn’t so much on partisan grounds as on philosophical ones.

[And it wasn’t an equal divide, either.  Remember President Richard Nixon’s slogan about the “silent majority”?  It was — to the tune of a 61% Nixon victory in the presidential election of 1972.]

Historically, the people who manage product brands have adhered to a formula similar to that of distant relatives getting together for a holiday meal: avoid talking about politics and religion.  But in times where politics can overtake even the best-curated brands, that’s become more difficult.

Recently, international market research firm Ipsos studied the issue. It tested a number of well-known brands that have been the subject of “political” controversies.  Considering one measure – stock price – Ipsos found that there has been minimal impact on brand health when looking at the publicly traded brands that President Donald Trump has mentioned in his various late-night tweets.

But viewed another way, Ipsos found that there’s an ever-expanding emphasis on partisan politics. Americans have become more likely to combine their behavior as consumers with their ideological or partisan loyalties.  One measure is the spike in searches on Google for the term “boycott,” as can be seen clearly in this chart:

According to Ipsos, politically-minded boycotts appear to be having noticeable business impacts. Looking at around 30 publicly traded brands, those with the highest rate of consumer boycotts since the November 2016 election are the ones that experienced the worst stock market performance – by a factor of about -15%.

Prudent advice would be for brands to respond to the hyper-partisan environment by trying not to be drawn into ideological debates. That’s a smart move, as most of the brands Ipsos tested have a fairly evenly balanced mix of self-described Democrats and Republicans.

In such an environment, no matter which way a company might be perceived to be moving “politically,” there will be a substantial portion of its customers who object.

And object they do: As part of its study, Ipsos surveyed consumers on their boycotting behaviors.  More than 25% of the survey respondents revealed that they have stopped using products or services from a company because of its perceived political leanings.  And as Ipsos has found, the brands with the highest rate of recent consumer boycott activity have also experienced the worst stock market performance.

Trying to avoid becoming part of today’s sometimes-toxic political environment isn’t always easy for brands to accomplish. Even for brands that make a concerted effort, it is increasingly hard to predict what factors might drive a company into the limelight — or whether anything the company does or doesn’t do can control what actually happens.

Ipsos cautions that staying on the political sidelines isn’t as easy as it has been in the past. It has determined that political party identification now ranks as one of the most central aspects of how consumers organize their lives – and how they relate to brands as well.

To illustrate, Ipsos presents the cases of Nordstrom and Uber. Both companies feature customer bases that skew somewhat more Democrat, but with significant percentages of Republicans as well.  Since the 2016 Presidential election, both companies have experienced politically-themed PR incidents that were magnified on social media platforms, to negative effect.

Different groups reacted in different ways – Republicans turned off by Nordstrom (dropping Ivanka Trump’s clothing line) and Democrats turned off by Uber (Travis Kalanick’s involvement with Donald Trump’s economic advisory council).

But the end result was the same:  the brands’ reputations suffered.

In today’s environment, it seems as though assiduously maintaining a non-partisan, non-confrontational stance is still the best policy for maintaining brand strength.  But it isn’t a guarantee anymore.

Additional findings and conclusion from the Ipsos evaluation can be found here.

The great, disappearing retail store act.

Phillip Nones Business, Economics, Social Commentary , , , , ,

What’s in store for retail? Maybe not much at all …

There have been quite a few news reports about store closings since the beginning of this year — many of them focused on big brands like Kmart, JCPenney and Abercrombie & Fitch.

But what about the retail industry as a whole?

Recently, GetApp conducted research among a more general group of U.S. retailers that run online retail operations as well as a physical stores.

Among this group of respondents, two out of three believe that they could be closing their physical stores within the coming decade and operating their business solely online:

  • Extremely likely to be running my business solely online by 2027: ~23%
  • Likely: ~43%
  • Not sure: ~17%
  • Unlikely: ~12%
  • Extremely unlikely: ~4%

If these figures turn out to be even somewhat accurate, the “retail apocalypse” some news organizations are talking about will have become even more of a reality than even the most hyperventilating journalists are predicting.

It certainly lends additional credibility to current narrative about the downward slide of shopping malls across the United States …

Good news: Online advertising “bot” fraud is down 10%. Bad news: It still amounts to $6.5 billion annually.

Phillip Nones Advertising, Business, Marketing Communications, Media, Publishing , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ad spending continues with quite-healthy growth, being forecast to increase by about 10% in 2017 according to a studied released this month by the Association of National Advertisers.

At the same time, there’s similarly positive news from digital advertising security firm White Ops on the ad fraud front. Its Bot Baseline Report, which analyzes the digital advertising activities of ANA members, is forecasting that economic losses due to bot fraud will decline by approximately 10% this year.

And yet … even with the expected decline, bot fraud is still expected to amount to a whopping $6.5 billion in economic losses.

The White Ops report found that traffic sourcing — that is, purchasing traffic from inorganic sources — remains the single biggest risk factor for fraud.

On the other hand, mobile fraud was considerably lower than expected.  Moreover, fraud in programmatic media buys is no longer particularly riskier than general market buys, thanks to improved filtration controls and procedures at media agencies.

Meanwhile, a new study conducted by Fraudlogix, and fraud detection company which monitors ad traffic for sell-side companies, finds that the majority of ad fraud is concentrated within a very small percentage of sources within the real-time bidding programmatic market.

The Fraudlogix study analyzed ~1.3 billion impressions from nearly 60,000 sources over a month-long period earlier this year. Interestingly, sites with more than 90% fraudulent impressions represented only about 1% of publishers, even while they contributed ~11% of the market’s impressions.

While Fraudlogix found nearly 19% of all impressions overall to be “fake,” its fraudulent behavior does not represent the industry as a whole. According to its analysis, just 3% of sources are causing more than two-thirds of the ad fraud.  [Fraudlogix defines a fake impression as one which generates ad traffic through means such as bots, scripts, click-farms or hijacked devices.]

As Fraudlogix CEO Hagai Schechter has remarked, “Our industry has a 3% fraud problem, and if we can clamp down on that, everyone but the criminals will be much better for it.”

That’s probably easier said than done, however. Many of the culprits are “ghost” newsfeed sites.  These sites are often used for nefarious purposes because they’re programmed to update automatically, making the sites seem “content-fresh” without publishers having to maintain them via human labor.

Characteristics of these “ghost sites” include cookie-cutter design templates … private domain registrations … and Alexa rankings way down in the doldrums. And yet they generate millions of impressions each day.

The bottom line is that the fraud problem remains huge.  Three percent of sources might be a small percentage figure, but that still means thousands of sources causing a ton of ad fraud.

What would be interesting to consider is having traffic providers submit to periodic random tests to determine the authenticity of their traffic. Such testing could then establish ratings – some sort of real/faux ranking.

And just like in the old print publications world, traffic providers that won’t consent to be audited would immediately become suspect in the eyes of those paying for the advertising.  Wouldn’t that development be a nice one …