Gender inequality weekly roundup

The response by Rachel Sklar on Daily Beast to Daily Beast’s own “Digital Power Index” and the sexism therein (just seven women out of 100) really nailed it.

“[The problem] actually pretty simple: Either you think all these industries are dominated across the very top levels by predominantly white men because there are numerous deep-seated societal norms and institutional biases that make it more challenging for women and minorities to advance as quickly and as far as their white male counterparts…or you think that these lists merely reflect the fact that white dudes must just be better at everything…. There is no murky middle ground where some of these industries are just more meritocratic and it just so happens that the same patterns that play out across historically gender-biased industries coincidentally bubble up to the surface here too.”

I think many white men believe that the world is a meritocracy because they are rewarded in all kinds of ways (rightly, they think). Actually, they started the race 100 yards ahead, but they’re willfully unaware and also somehow still proud when they win.

Sklar name-checks Anne-Marie Slaughter’s piece in The Atlantic, which I’ve also been thinking about since last week. The piece is about why women can’t have it all. She carefully unpacks tropes like, “It’s possible if you are just committed enough,” “It’s possible if you sequence it right” and “It’s possible if you marry the right person.” In the piece, she discusses family, pressure to be on site in the office and institutional prejudice against working moms. There’s no real solution floated forward (one of the problems with systemic prejudices is that it’s hard to solve them!), except maybe changing our agrarian school schedule to better match work schedules. Her conclusion is basically that we should all do what makes us happy.

I thought Rebecca Traister hit a nice volley back to Slaughter in her piece in Salon by saying that we should start by never even saying the words “have it all” ever again:

“It is a trap, a setup for inevitable feminist short-fall. Irresponsibly conflating liberation with satisfaction, the ‘have it all’ formulation sets an impossible bar for female success and then ensures that when women fail to clear it, it’s feminism — as opposed to persistent gender inequity — that’s to blame.”

Which brings us back to where we started.

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Mobile to the future, seriously

Another wowing graph that demonstrates the wildly off-base strategy of pouring money into print when you should be spending it where the eyeballs really are: mobile: Take a gander at the print and mobile bars, specifically, on either end:

“Not having a mobile strategy/roadmap in place for your brand is a recipe for disruption. The golden age of mobile is here and will be here for years.” via

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The GM-Facebook showdown

Two posts on the GM-Facebook face-off. Similar thoughts (and similar to those I’ve voiced before), but the lesson is that brands need to up their content game to appeal to users in new ways and meet consumers where they are. The technology (and marketing philosophy around same) seems to be evolving faster than brands can strategize, but brands must engage users — via the users’ rules — if they want to succeed.

“When brands focus more of their resources on creating compelling digital content—things that people care about sharing—they’ll be able to reach the audiences they’re after.” via

“Advertisers need to think about new end-to-end experiences that inspire and engage a far more connected and discerning audience.” via

Ultimately Facebook is a revolution, and that’s bigger than one brand. As I’ve said before, I wouldn’t root against ’em.

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Trusted brands rule social

UCLA and HP researchers have determined that successful tweets have common — and predictable — characteristics. Per this fascinating piece in the Atlantic, the researchers’ algorithm can predict a tweeted article’s popularity “with a remarkable 84 percent accuracy” based on the principle that news’ social success can be defined by source, category, language used and the celebrity factor. But the striking thing is just how much the “source” part accounts for:

“What led most overwhelmingly, and most predictably, to sharing was the person or organization who shared the information in the first place. …Brand, even and especially on the Internet, matters. Online, the researchers are saying, the power of the brand is exactly what it has been since brands first emerged in the Middle Ages: It’s a vector of trust. ..When it comes to news, trust is actually much more important than emotion. Shareability is largely a function of reliability.”

It’s all a part of the trend of consumers having conversations with brands and vice versa — instead of being overtly bought and sold as in days past — and the resulting trust rewarded to brands who do it well. Extrapolating, content marketing and social marketing, which help brands build that trust and have those conversations, have with this study been proven out with measurable statistics.

As recently as last year, many brands’ strategy could be summarized by the following (ridiculous) two-pronged approach: 1. Chase SEO (damn the quality of the result); 2. Pray for something to (somehow) go viral. But the Internet changes with alarming rapidity, and the past year and a half has seen a major shift away from these tactics. SEO baiting abated, thanks to Google tweaking its algorithms to rank better content higher, and brands acknowledged that since viral content is by its nature unreliable, they shouldn’t rely on it.

This isn’t to say that search and innate shareability shouldn’t be considerations for brands — they absolutely should; they are foundational. But the new forward strategy is reaching users where they are (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.), giving them something reliable and useful, and earning trust in return.

In the case of so-called old media, they must become trusted sources again in this new landscape. Successful new brands (Fab.com to name one) are taking it even one step further with an almost post-branded attitude: Their online presence not only establishes trust with consumers, but their conversational and understanding tone also unpacks branding itself and exposes undisguised sellers as outmoded entities that peddle wares to you but don’t really get you.

Reaching consumers and establishing trust by getting them isn’t a new concept in advertising and marketing, but it’s one that must be repeatedly learned anew as consumer attitudes evolve. It’s a snarky world, but it’s the one we live in, and brand strategies must evolve or perish.

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Content strategy in context

From content strategist Rahel Bailie’s Intentional Design blog, regarding what she terms Big Content, which is to say: “Consideration of content beyond the copy, and even beyond the content.”

“When users feel good about an experience now, they will give feedback now. Conversely, when users have a bad experience, they are more likely to hold onto that feeling of indignation until they feel heard. …For organizations that increasingly depend on user-generated content as part of their marketing strategy, it’s important for them to (a) get users to generate content and (b) get users to generate content that reflects well on their customer experience. In other words, building an environment that encourages users to give immediate feedback should increase the number of instances of positive feedback.”

More — way more — about content strategy and how it relates to user experience at her Big Design Slideshare. Below is my favorite bit: What content means in context:

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Can we monetize mobile already, please?

I didn’t really understand a lot of the slides in Mary Meeker’s presentation at D10, which All Things D and Scribd were nice enough to share, but a few sure stood out.

In this pair of slides we can see that tablet (which counts as mobile, compared with desktop) has seen explosive growth.

Now look at the monetization.

What?! Why are we still trying to justify $3.50 CPM on desktops (versus 75 cents on mobile!) when as we’ve just seen, mobile use is on track to surpass desktop (as it already has in India). This is not any one business’s problem (which seems to be a popular opinion with regard to Facebook). It’s every business’s problem, and it’s mystifying how we have been ignoring it. Web publishers are already playing catch-up to web users’/readers’ value versus those from print (compare $10 or so) — let’s not roll over any more than we must. Let’s work on real solutions for monetizing mobile already. Really awesome sales and marketing products that draw in the users who are there already, ready to be shown great stuff.

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Is Facebook destined to fail? Don’t bet on it

I know Michael Wolff is a provocateur, and I take just about everything he does, says or writes with a large grain of salt. But this Technology Review piece about Facebook being “a bust” is just ridiculous in its arguments and assumptions. He basically makes a few on-the-nose observations, draws all the wrong conclusions, then dismantles his original thesis.

Basically, he writes, Facebook is destined to fail because it’s ad-supported.

He makes a correct, if rather obvious, observation: “At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media.” And he is right when he says that “the daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency.” And of course he’s on target when he reports, “I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.”

But there’s nothing new there — any of it. We already know CPMs don’t work. As an industry, we’re testing out (or should be, anyway) new revenue streams to see what will work. Pay walls? Maybe — but the jury’s still out whether non-print-subscribing users will put up money for the website only. Cutting jobs (and quality)? Likely, except while it helps the bottom line in the short-term, it erodes trust between reader and media in the long-term. Better targeted ads? Probably, yes, until everyone opts out and/or the government bans it. Running the exact same stories on different local channels to save on news-gathering and ad sales teams? I hope to the heavens that stops really soon. Meantime, our collective time is probably better spent thinking up new ways to do business online and encouraging and learning from those companies who are testing new ways of doing business — like Facebook. Otherwise, you’re just a hater.

So his conclusion that “Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it” is an utterly hyperbolic eye-roller. And his acknowledgment that the company “has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn’t advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits” is actually an argument in favor of the very thing he claims to want fixed a mere paragraph before. Not only should Facebook “reinvent advertising,” it must. Because the way things work now for consumer websites, as Wolff acknowledges, isn’t working. And I think it will. Or at least I wouldn’t bet against ’em.

Wolff draw parallels between Google and Facebook, yet somehow fails to draw a similar parallel for Facebook’s growth potential. He praises Google for its ad system, acknowledging that it also “didn’t have the big idea at the company’s founding, either,” but dismisses Facebook altogether: “Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something. Relationships? Media? Communications? Communities? Something big, anyway.”

“Big” is right — it has redefined all those things, so therefore it can and will create its own, new reality. So when Wolff says that Facebook’s strategy is “Just wait,” I say, “Hell, yes.” The company, in its brief life, has completely flipped the script on all the items he mentions. They just did it. They’re doing it. It is, in fact, as Wolff says, “the bridge to new modes of human connection.” And that is the opposite of being “left in the same position as all other media companies.” Most other media companies are failing at the ad-web business. We know this. Most other media companies (and, frankly, non-media companies) are drafting off of what Facebook is doing — and following its rules and ecosystem, just as they did with Google in years past.

I’m not Facebook’s biggest fan; it often pisses me off as much as it pleases me. But I’ve seen it change the web business from the front lines these past few years. Jobs are being created — “Social Media Editor,” “Social Marketing Manager” — that didn’t exist only two or three years ago, and these are being directly guided by Facebook (and, to a lesser degree, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.): its game, its rules. As Google did with “SEO,” so Facebook is creating an industry around its product.

I guess the most (and the least, after all these words I just typed) I can say is this: I’m looking forward to the day when I can say, “I bought Facebook at $29.”

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When incremental change isn’t enough

I’m loving all the logical thinking in this excerpt from The Business Model Innovation Factory by Saul Kaplan. Lots of gems here; he does a great job of clearly identifying and explaining concepts and principles that are plainly true, including “Transformation is hard” and “We need to try more stuff.”

Sometimes tweaks aren’t enough. Sometimes nothing short of reinventing yourself, your organization, or your community is called for. The start of the 21st century is one of those times. If anything is certain about the new millennium it’s the pace of change. New technology relentlessly hurdles into our lives. Ideas and practices travel around the world at Internet speed.

Incremental change may have been enough at the end of an industrial era marked by me-too products and services, process re-engineering, best practices, benchmarks, and continuous improvement. We have built institutions that are far better at share taking than at market making. We have become really good at tweaks.

Most industrial era leaders never had to change their business model. One model worked throughout their entire careers. They could focus on improving their market position and competitiveness by making incremental improvements to the existing model. …Most leaders do what they are comfortable with and know how to do, they strengthen and become even more entrenched in their current business models. They add new products and services to the current model. They deploy technology to strengthen current capabilities. They extend the current business model into new markets. And they try to create favorable laws and go to court to block new business models. These strategies may create value in the short-term but none of these efforts to strengthen existing business models are effective for long in the face of a disruptive competitor that is changing the way value is created, delivered, and captured through an entirely new business model. Disruption is now the norm instead of the exception.

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Where are the digital editorial workflow tools?

Mediabistro captured some great thoughts on workflow from Fast Company social media editor Anjali Mullany:

“I’m a strong believer that workflow and technology changes the kind of journalism you put out. What I’ve seen is just how crucially important it is to have in place workflows that make sense and to use technology that understands that workflow.

For example, a CMS [content management system] that has a lot of constraints behind it will literally change the kind of journalism you can produce and the workflow. …If you don’t have a great project management system, whether you’re using Basecamp or Google Docs or whatever, if that project management system doesn’t understand how your reporters operate — if they feel they have to jump between email, IM, and text and whatever — that can actually disrupt the kind of work they’re able to produce.

Trying to figure out strategies for digital newsrooms, technologically and in terms of workflow, is the biggest challenge. I think it really comes down to these hardcore, very fundamental infrastructure type problems that haven’t been adequately solved yet.”

Unrelated (yet completely related) recent story about how The Bangor Daily News overhauled its workflow to incorporate Google Docs and WordPress.

A great workflow can elevate your work and a bad one can really hold you back, and I sincerely hope we will see more efforts to improve processes surrounding digital workflow in the near future. Just as curation is getting rightly hailed as an essential element of filtering out the noise and making sense of the Internet, so too should great processes be invented to corral the historically awful editorial workflow found in typical CMSes. It’s overdue. Way overdue. Not just Asana and Basecamp and the like, but tools and hacks that work specifically for journalists and that journalists can finally put to work.

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WEHT Flickr?

There’s much to consider in this Gizmodo piece by Mat Honan on Flickr’s takeover by Yahoo. It’s a mix of deeply researched tech reporting, informed opinion, “WEHT Flickr?” and Flickr: Behind the Music. Mostly, it’s a detailed analysis of what happens when previously innovative companies are “forced to focus on integration, not innovation,” and it’s resonant because it’s true.

Truer words have never been written:

“Flickr’s mobile and social failures are ultimately both symptoms of the same problem: a big company trying to reinvent itself by gobbling up smaller ones, and then wasting what it has. The story of Flickr is not that dissimilar to the story of Google’s buyout of Dodgeball, or Aol’s purchase of Brizzly. Beloved Internet services with dedicated communities, dashed upon the rocks of unwieldy companies overrun with vice presidents.”

“…When Flickr hit the ground at Yahoo it was crushed with engineering and service requirements it had to meet as per demands of the acquisition integration team. Those were a drain on resources, human and financial.”

I know the history of the Internet is being written as we live and breathe, but so far anyway, has there ever in the history of the Internet been a good product takeover? Maybe YouTube by Google? I can’t think of another off the top of my head, probably for the reasons detailed in the article. Let this be a lesson and a warning to start-ups and big companies alike: Selling/acquiring a start-up might scale it, but it will almost certainly kill it, too.

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