Make Digital Marketing Work

There is no escaping the fact that we live in uncertain times, and as a humble agency we try to stay abreast of all the issues that might affect us.  We need to make decisions and predictions and so we do, but try not to bet the farm on something that could go against us and bring the whole world crashing down about us.

One thing is for sure and that the world is moving and turning and changing at a pace that is likely to catch anyone out at the moment if they are not very careful and even if they are you can still find yourself with a prime set of incisors lodged in your rear end.  Yesterday was one of those days and our thoughts are with those affected as various announcements caused global concern on the financial markets and another high street retailer went into administration.

It was only a few weeks ago that I was talking about Book publishing and made the statement that “shares in Waterstones are safe for the minute”.  I didn’t consider Border’s Books and that might be the problem.  Online retail has reached a pivotal moment of preference for consumers and there are at least two brands that most people have considered ‘first’ when it comes to online book retail.  For companies that are left with a predominantly store retail model, Christmas has been a saviour each year to keep the wolf from the door.  It is probably a combination of shifting purchase points to online and a less extravagant Christmas brought on by the prevailing economic conditions but I can’t help feeling that organisations who do only bet on physical stores for retail are going to find it harder and harder.  Certain items such as perishables will naturally appeal to the senses of touch and smell and therefore are not as close to the front line as those which have a shelf life but the writing is on the wall.  It is no longer a case of online being a risk, it is now a case that ignoring online or treating it as an ancillary channel is probably the riskiest strategy of all.

Could this be the last Christmas where we viewed online as anything other than the primary retail channel?

One of the big announcements last year was that Google had expanded it’s search robot’s capabilities to take account of Adobe Macromedia Flash files.

Back when I started building websites in the mid 90s I was lucky enough to work with some of the best young designers in the business at that time, many of whom now head up departments and whose every murmur is greeted with hushed reverence.  At the time we were making things up as we went along because there wasn’t anyone who had yet defined specific rules of how to do things or demonstrated effectiveness as a standard.  Most of the time we discovered new and interesting things because everyone I worked with was incredibly bright.  One of the things that we embraced completely was Flash, and created some absolutely beautiful sites.   Here are some lessons that we learned with pre release and early versions of the software

Flash wasn’t easily updateable.  In fact every time you needed to make a change to a seemingly innocuous piece of text, you had to spend ages working on it, and present the client with a rather large bill that they didn’t appreciate.  That problem got sorted when Flash started to talk to external data sources.

People get carried away with Flash.  These were the days of the flash introduction and people seemed to think that having an advertising like introduction (similar to TV channel introduction animations was a good thing).  Usability taught us that users didn’t stick around to watch them.  Later a ‘skip this’ button was added to the animation and then it was (mostly) dropped completely as analytics showed us that users preferred to get straight into the meat and veg of a site’s serving and ignore any little tasty treat that stopped them getting to the content.  The important thing we learned was that the web was not a broadcast medium and that lesson has stood me in extremely good stead over the years. It was about that time that I started using the phrase that a website is workhorse not a work of art.  The key is to understand that the site is for the users not for the organisation producing it.

Flash couldn’t be seen by Google.  This was the killer to the large flash sites as your content didn’t exist in Google and so neither did you.  All but the clueless abandoned flash only sites in development, and the clients who insisted upon it pretty soon were having crisis meetings about how to get any meaningful figures on usage, whilst they looked at a pretty short report showing how many times the homepage had been viewed and not a lot else.   Google’s announcement at being able to crawl and index Flash changed the rules of web design again.

Flash did find a place amongst Hybrid sites that presented information in HTML and also provided Flash animations.  It meant that users could choose to view rich animations that delivered information as well as standard text and graphics.  Sites that have persisted in this and not undergone redesign since the announcement in 2008 have run the risk of having their content duplicated in Google’s index and whilst I haven’t heard of specific examples of this particular scenario, Google did treat general cases of duplicate content with extreme prejudice.  At any rate the writing has been on the wall for a company with a hybrid site to redesign it as matter of urgency.

Flash couldn’t be seen by every browser.  In many ways this is still as much of a problem as it has always been.  Computer browsers don’t treat Flash with the same disdain that they used to but a myriad of mobile and alternative device browsers have been added and the vast majority of sites do not account for them.

That brings me full circle.  There was a belief in the beginning that Flash sites were brand building and I sat in meetings back then making claims about ‘brand and content coming together to provide a total experience’.  I am less convinced of that argument now and have seen examples of content tests setting Flash based animations against standard HTML and graphics in comparison tests.  The inconvenient truth that I have witnessed is that user tests seem to conclusively show that users prefer HTML.

My instinct tells me that Flash isn’t inherently bad, it is just used badly which gives it a bad reputation, but I also think that designers need to ask themselves very carefully why they elect to use Flash.  In the end I come back to my two maxims.  At any rate, I do hope that the all inclusive single Flash movie that people used to create and parade as a site will be a thing of the past.  Users didn’t spend that much time on them.

The site is for the users to use and we should make it as intuitive and informing as possible.

And

A website is a workhorse not a work of art.

What do you think?

I try to stay up to date on all aspects of marketing, and have for many years followed a group of people who run seminars and webinars and conferences and all manner of events where you pay to hear them present.

The sales pitch goes like this.

You are a startup and you have created something amazing in your shed that all the world needs but you haven’t got a clue how to bring it to market.  You therefore look at Google and put in something like Internet Marketing or How to market products, and there suddenly is an ad asking you if you are happy with your marketing.

This is the amazing way that Google works, it gives you an ad for what you are looking for at exactly the time you are looking for it.  Of course you are going to click on it.  You then go thorugh to a website and you give them your email address in return for a document that promises you the secrets of all marketing.  Sounds good so far doesn’t it?  Now the kicker, couple of times a week you get invited to an event or webinar which is actually a pitch to you so that you will spend thousands on learning all about marketing.  The challenge they lay down to you is if you do not do this then you are not taking your business seriously.  If you do pay up you will be a member of the elite that will very soon be driving around in an Aston Martin and dating supermodels (ok some people like Porsches and would rather have Brad Pitt but you get the idea).

Now those are pretty strong and emotive words so its natural that a lot of people will cough up the cash.  Now before I go any further I will say that I have never coughed up the cash to go to one of these but I know the routine.  I was originally an actor and trained professionally so I know how to command a room and whip up emotion in an audience, I therefore know the gig and I have sat at the back whilst some of these people went to work.

It is important to get as many people as possible in the room and so hotel conference facilities are perfect.  You keep it informal, you move around a lot and you keep the energy up as you promise this and that and make sure that you associate yourself with their success.  It can be very effective and its a tactic that is used by Politicians and cult leaders.  In fact Adolf Hitler was extremely good at this technique.  That gave you food for thought didn’t it?

The thing is that they then turn things around and say to you that you don’t really want to be in the business you are in.  What you really want to do is the same thing as them.  They tell you that you don’t actually need to be an expert to give presentations like this, all you need is to say that you are.  I’ve heard one example given of a chap who gives presentations about running restaurants to new restauranters, but who has never run a restaurant in his life.  This is explained to you as if its a good tihng.

Ok stop.  Back the truck up.  There is a guy here who is telling you that he is an expert in things and that you should be in this business as well, and it doesn’t matter if you actually have experience in the industry or not, all you have to do is say you are and people will give you money.  Have you spotted the contradiction in the argument yet?

They will tell you about how they know more about Google advertising than anyone else in the world.  What you mean more than the guys at Google, or agencies that are managing multi millions on behalf of clients and have whole teams to devote to it?  Its interesting that as the recession has bit harder so the claims coming from these people has got more and more outrageous.  I expect them to pretty soon announce that they are the reincarnation of Christ, Adam Smith and David Ogilvy all wrapped into one black turtle necked jersey package.

Now the spoiler.  Everything they say can be read in a book, and it is a book that wasn’t written by them.  I would argue that their information is also out of date because they are not at the leading edge of marketing innovation but for most businesses that shouldn’t matter too much.  The books will cost you somewhere between £5 and £25, and you can then go online to discuss them.  There are genuine thinkers in the world and they are very happy to share their knowledge with you, but these guys on the stage are not them.  They are telling you the same thing, don’t update their pitches often enough and are charging you a premium for hearing something that you can get in a store in your town, or order for next day delivery from Amazon.

Our Booklist should get you started quite nicely, and there is also the British Library that is there to help you for free too.  If your money is tight and you don’t know how to market yourself these books will give you absolutely everything you need to know to get started, and after that when you have built a business, an agency will be able to help you with some creative ideas to get you on to the next level.  People in agencies have been doing this for many years and will take responsibility for the work they do.  They won’t simply tell you how to do it and pick up a fee.

Please don’t be fooled by the charlatans.

There is a huge amount of debate going on the web suddenly where everyone is talking about Strategy.  Most of it is concerned with Social Media and both singular, (Strategy) and plural (Strategies) are being bandied around.  The thing is that most of the time the people saying it are not talking about strategy (either singular or plural) at all.  What they are talking about is tactics.

Just so we get this right.  A strategy is the grand plan, and in marketing terms it has a business goal.  That business goal might be to increase sales (and if we are talking about digital media I would argue that any strategy that doesn’t have this goal is shooting too low),  it could be to raise brand awareness, gather more prospects, increase customer retention (which by nature should include an element of increasing sales as well).  The point is that it is tangible.  It is related to the business as a whole and says “This is what success looks like and this is how we are going to measure it.  I like to apply an acid test when I define a digital marketing strategy and that is to ask myself “Would David Ogilvy agree with me and understand what I was talking about”.  It’s amazing how focused this little mantra can make you.

Now at no point in defining my strategic goal have I used the words blogging, Facebook, Twitter, email, eCRM, display advertising, social media, search, SEO, SEM, Website, user experience, usability, accessibility, backlinks, Google, Bing, ad exchanges, PPC or any of the other terms that make up the digital marketing armoury.  That’s because these are not strategies, they are tactics.  Another dead giveaway for when people don’t understand the difference seems to me to be when they start talking about strategies in the plural.  It’s a pretty intense and complicated thing for a campaign to achieve one strategic goal so bandying them around like baubles on a Christmas Tree is a dangerous thing to do and could quite likely lead to a confused campaign.

Once the strategic goals have been set my next task is to look at the customer.  Another little mantra I like to use comes from my days as a drama student.

(As an aside, I was probably the worst drama student in the world but there were lots of extremely cute girls that were also drama students and I was in a minority of heterosexual men so this suited my strategic goal at the time and enabled me to employ many tactics to achieve it.)

The mantra takes Stanislavsky’s seven questions of An Actor Prepares and refers them to my customer.

• Who are they?
• Where are they?
• When is it?
• What do they want?
• Why do they want it?
• How will they get it?
• What must be overcome?

There is another three that I like to add in as well which are:

• What will they do with it once they have got it?
• What do they currently think?
• What do I want them to think?

This paints a very clear picture for me of my two ends.  I know what I want to achieve and how to measure it and now I know a lot about the people who are going to help me do it.

At this point I start to look at my tactics.  I look at how to contact them, and I start to plan the journey we need to undertake together in order to reach my strategic goal.  It’s only at this point that I will start to talk about the elements of digital marketing that can help us, and there is absolutely nothing to gain by limiting myself to one tactic.  I want to use as many as I can and as many as the budget will allow.

This process keeps me focused and ensures that everything I do has the goal in mind.

I suspect it’s no different to a boxer whose strategic goal is to knock his opponent out in the fifth round.  He looks at the strengths and weaknesses of his opponent, studies previous fights and looks for ways to achieve his goal.  He then decides to tactically use his jab and concentrate on body work.  He plans the journey the fight will take so that he is ready in the fifth to land his big punch and achieve his strategic goal.  Never will he talk about his body work strategy.

I found the news waiting for me this morning that Media Week is to be removed from the newsstand and another of my favourite Haymarket Business Media titles, Revolution is to become a quarterly supplement giveaway with Marketing Magazine.

According to the story I read, Media Week is going to retain an online editor and utilise the staff of Brand Republic which is a several times a day destination for my browser.  The brand is also going to survive (at least for now) as the Media Week Awards and the Media Week Annual Conference but that must be slim solace for a brand I’ve known in the industry for a very long time, not to mention the staff who are being cut.

Revolution is going to be published as a supplement to Marketing Magazine which the press release says is unaffected by the changes and also backed by what the press release calls a “Blogging initiative in 2010”.  Not sure what that means, but along with New Media Age, Revolution acts as my compass in the industry and I for one am going to miss the title a lot.  When I worked in New York Revolution opened their offices at the same time as we did and the two ex pat crews had a drink or three on Bleeker Street several times.

It is the first of what I suspect are going to become more regular announcements from magazine and newspapers of layoffs, restructures, consolidations and new initiatives all aimed at cutting costs to make up the shortfall from falling circulations and advertising sales.  It’s a brutal world out there now if you are in publishing and we send our thoughts out to anyone at Haymarket who has been adversely affected.

We put our thoughts down about newspapers and magazines in previous blog posts, and we saw Nick Gregg offer his advice in a piece entitled The 5 key action points that might save publishers. Similarly  Robert Andrews gave out his advice in his piece Four Controversial Ways To Save Regional Papers Online, and that struck us as intrinsically the best way for publishers to think.  Utilise the assets you have in new markets to preserve funding for your product.  The move away from print to online is now pretty irresistible and unless publishers have got a strategy in place to meet it, more and more titles are going to disappear or be consolidated and it is going to happen very quickly.

We have been approached a lot of times by potential clients who do not have very much budget and our policy is to help wherever we can, and to be honest about where we can’t.  One of the biggest misconceptions that seems to come up is that you can perform parts of the overall mix and expect it to work.  You can’t, or at least you shouldn’t.  The interactive Mix works because it deals with a cause and effect basis that engages with consumers may not be aware of your products and services but are open to finding out more about them.  It does so using techniques that have been proven to work but which are never quite the same for each client but which rely on careful measurement and analysis throughout each stage to ensure that the results are kept optimum.  We can work across a number of budgets but the ROI we deliver is in terms of actual sales and revenue which we create demand for through the process

It isn’t enough to simply build up the database, it is what you then do with the database that makes our techniques deliver.  We build up trust and begin to test offers whilst segmenting the data based on a series of criteria.  Its all about building relationships between clients and customers, and to build on this through to first sale, repeat and regular sale and then referral.

When we have created the process you will then be able to see it working for you as an overall marketing process, so that for an agreed spend you will already have an idea of how much money you are going to make.

We do pride ourselves in being different and offering up a joined up digital marketing solution because we don’t actually see too many other agencies doing that.  At the same time there is an argument raging about whether digital agencies are grown up enough to act as lead agency for clients.  We think that the reason many digital agencies are not able to offer this is because they are still focused on providing tactical solutions rather than looking at the strategic marketing process that is needed for each client and offering a joined up solution to meet it.  I’ve been having a lot of discussions online about this very subject and the longer the conversations go on the more I am convinced that the solution is to look at all digital media as a strategic toolbox, and not focus on providing individual disciplines.

A lot of this isn’t necessarily the fault of the industry because most agencies started out as tactical suppliers of the shiny new thing, whether it was web design fifteen years ago, or display advertising twelve years ago, or search ten years ago, or email eight years ago, or analytics seven years ago  or social media five years ago.

That made a lot of sense then because the accepted sensible way to do things was get in bed with an offline brand or advertising agency and become the digital guys for them whilst getting introduced to a great client list and charging whatever the market would pay.   Digital Agencies were the remora fish to a bunch of sharks, cleaning off whatever needed to be done and some have grown extremely large doing it.  That symbiotic relationship now though is challenged because clients have heard that this digital media lark is cheaper and works better than the offline stuff.  Of course Ad and brand agencies are still telling the world not to panic and that they are still the top of the food chain.  More over they are still looking at the world in terms of the way that they have always done things, and therein lays the problem.  The world isn’t like that that anymore and it won’t work.

Clients want it and digital agencies have to stop thinking tactically if they are going to provide it.  Its taking the strategic approach that will give digital the showcase it deserves and deliver the benefits to clients.

The conservative party today announced that they would initiate a deregulation of media ownership that would rival the 1980s big bang regulation of the financial industry.  The details are of course very sketchy at the moment but the aim, according to the Telegraph is to,

“sweep away cross-media ownership rules which prevent local groups owning more than one newspaper or radio station to provide tougher competition for the BBC and give commercial operators more chance of survival”

David Hunt was interviewed and quoted as saying “There is a massive crisis in the media industry. We will strip away the regulations in the same way that Big Bang revolutionised the City to make it a major financial centre of the world.”

Now this story s set to run and run and in a speech on Thursday Mr Hunt is expected to elaborate a little more but I can’t help feeling a little uneasy about this.  On the one hand he is right that media owners are facing very turbulent times but that is as much to do with the march of progress and technology as it is to do with the financial crisis and the existence of the BBC. .I am also uneasy with complete deregulation of the media in principal, especially given how complete deregulation of the financial industry (the Conservative party’s own example not mine) has left the state of the world’s banking industry, and whilst I do not know any media barons personally I am not inspired by the thought of the guardians of news being given free reign whilst at the same time weakening the BBC.

I am looking forward though to finding out more details of what is planned although I will miss BBC3 and BBC4 if they do go as they are two channels I like to watch quite a lot.

Bing has finally launched in a full version in the UK today.  We started taking a look at it when it became available as a Beta and obviously did as much as we could to understand how it aggregates its searches so that we were able to make whatever changes were necessary without harming our Google optimisation.  It has enabled us to some high listings for a number of our key search terms which has obviously pleased us.  Our take on this so far is that Bing is a perfectly respectable search engine that does what it says on the tin.  That’s the problem really, it is absolutely fine but there is nothing there to make us immediately drop everything Google and switch to Bing.  We first saw traffic coming through to interactive-mix.com on une 11^th with terms such as “Interactive Marketing Agency” and variations of our company name featuring most regularly but since then Bing has produced 7.89% of our natural search traffic whilst Google has produced 89.47% of it.  There is a massive gap between these two and Yahoo which has produced 1.32% and Ask barely registers at all with less than 1%

Even if we skew the date range to take the best advantage of Bing, Google’s dominance is barely dented and Bing achieved 8.26% of our total natural search traffic.

We are not claiming that this is representative across the entire web or even for our industry but the message to us seems to be clear that Google is still the dominant force in Search by a very long way and whilst Bing is the second most important search engine it still produces only a fraction of the traffic for us that Google does.  This seems to show quite comprehensively that visitors to our site haven’t found a reason to switch their search to Bing.  Obviously we are going to keep an eye on this and it is only the first official day for the new search engine, so we will keep people informed of how we see things shaping up.

Over the last few weeks I have been looking at publishing.  It’s too big a subject to fit into one or even a week’s posts and there is a lot going on in the rest of the agency but I did want to include a bit about magazine (periodical) publishers because whilst they do share things in common with newspapers it is a hybrid problem that they face and one which may require the most outlandish of solutions if profits are to be protected by the publishing companies.

First off I have been a dedicated magazine reader all my life.  When I was a child I read comics, and then at the age of 11 started reading titles such as ‘Skateboard Scene’ to go with my new found passion whilst trying to learn how to bowl ride.  Other titles that I have been devoted to have included The Face, NME, The Stage, Diver Magazine,  Which, Home and Garden, Private Eye, The Economist, Personal Computer World, , PC User, Computing, PC Week, Internet Magazine, Internet User, Wired, Marketing, Marketing Week, Revolution,  New Media Age.

The point is that I have read a lot of magazines.  They can loosely be split into titles I read for pleasure and titles I read for work.  Of the ones I read for pleasure I read them to find out what was new, what was cool, what to buy, what was a better buy, how to find the best price. I also read some of them to find out where to go and what to do.  I made sure I was in the know and that the kit and equipment I had was as up to date and as quality as I could afford.

Of the titles which I read for professional reasons I was able to keep my knowledge up to date and current, abreast of new trends and thought processes, aware of competitors and what they were doing and saying.  I was able to get good deals for equipment I wanted the company to buy and I was able to check my salary against similar jobs when it was leading up to a wage review and I was able to find new job opportunities when it was time to move on.  I read them on the train, at home and in the office.  I read them early in the morning in the evening at weekends and at lunchtime.  They were informing, entertaining and reference material.  They were an invaluable part of my life.

That’s a pretty exhaustive list and my memory fails me at what point I learned that these were actually termed as business to business and business to consumer titles.  I suspect that my experience of magazines is not so dissimilar to that of other people.  They provide in depth knowledge and resources for niche audiences.  The more information and stats it was able to provide me with the better I liked it.

These days I have a single resource for pretty much all these things and that is the Internet.  The Internet is extremely good at providing resources to niche audiences at a low cost which is bad news for the B2C titles.  It is also the greatest information resource yet conceived by man which is bad news for B2C titles.  Blogging provides more analysis and news than I can ever consume in a single sitting and Google provides me with lots of research material to base purchases on.  It seems that advertisers, the bedrock of all periodical publication agree with Ad revenues down for the entire industry.

It’s a problem that publishers have seen coming but now it is here most seem to be no nearer a solution and ill prepared for the shift.  Instead of tooling up and preparing for this well in advance there is suddenly a wealth of ads for digital directors and Heads of Digital.  Head hunters are on the phones screening candidates for their ‘gravitas’, knowledge, and willingness to explore any and all possibilities to find the correct solution for their business.  The sad thing is that if this is genuinely their first foray into this arena then it is probably already too late to find a business solution to the problem.

Fortunately that doesn’t include the majority, who have explored a number of possibilities over the years, from teasers and paywalls to new news free and value added services.  The trends and solutions have gone in cycles with the Economist recently announcing that more of their content will move to behind the paywall.  They are putting a lot of faith in the belief that news and commentary has value to the audience, especially as there are free alternatives available on blogs.  Their issues (certainly as far as some points go) are therefore the same as those facing newspapers and there are enough citizen journalists who will be more than willing to write the story and capture the audience whilst they come up with new and interesting ways to monetise their blog.  Most will fail and vanish after a few attempts but they will soon be replaced at the speed of Google and eventually someone will figure out the method that sticks.

One model I looked at some ten years ago now was for an independent magazine called SimplyCity.  It was aimed at the modern urban living woman and seemed to me to be perfect for the Carrie Bradshaws of New York which is where it was first issued.  The magazine provided content and ideas on where to go, what to buy, what to wear, and other lifestyle information.  It had a catchy title and an attitude that epitomised single women living in the city at that time.  The website then gave additional content but most importantly provided access to purchase the products and other items that the printed magazine had introduced its audience to.

There was also a theme that ran through the articles and follow up articles so that each subsequent version directed traffic to the next instalment.  If the previous instalment had been online then the next one would be offline and visa verse.  This was therefore a case of offline driving traffic online and online driving traffic offline.  You got some content free (online) and paid for other content (offline) and online supported itself with eCommerce.  It’s a model I loved but in amongst the dot com crash the cost of managing what was effectively two sets of publishing teams (offline and online) and carrying stock was too much for the company and its investors to bare.  We were all pretty young then and I know my knowledge wasn’t as rounded then as it is now and so I wasn’t able to give them as good advice as I could today.

If we were doing this today I would recommend that the magazine operate as an affiliate which would claim commissions back from products featured, and sell advertising to increase the visibility of lead products and services.  That would negate the need for stock and fulfilment whilst providing an online revenue stream and a reason for the site to co-exist alongside the printed version rather than cannibalising it.  The question of dual content is one that is still expensive but if the audience could be tapped into this a series of trackbacks to relevant blogs could also be integrated so that commentary and discussion was provided and boosted the audience’s own SEO efforts.

Another idea that has been suggested to me and which I agree with is providing access to tools and data to subscribers.  The content is therefore available to anyone online but methods to interact with the stored data of the publication are made available through applications.

I began by saying that this post was too long for a single article so I will pick it up again in another article.

I have been finishing off my blog post about Magazine publishing and its proving to be too lengthy to post in one go but a couple of things appearing in the Guardian also caught my eye recently which ask some pretty important questions of the publishing industry in general.  The first one is the move by Murdoch to remove News Internationals content from Google once the paywalls have been implemented.

This is a bold move and in some of the discussions I have seen appearing on the web the following comment seemed to sum up a view that whilst harsh may have some truth in it if things continue to play out as they have been.

“ Everything he’s doing is looking increasingly petulant and misguided.  He’s a relic of a bygone age, lashing with what monetary clout he still has against his increasing irrelevance”.

As a self confessed intellectual snob I certainly won’t miss content from the tabloid arm of News International and removing it from the world’s search results to me is a bit like cleaning up the distorted noise on a 1940s swing recording, but that is not all that we are talking about here.  The full list of News International titles includes The Times, The Sunday Times.  Whilst these are absolute bastions of British journalism, it would be rare for a truly news worthy story to appear uniquely in these titles.  As I pointed out in my blog post about newspaper publishing on the one hand you have the BBC content and on the other you have a multitude of bloggers and citizen journalists who are all capable of writing their own story and gathering opinion from around the world that will all then be available across the web in seconds.

News International are never backward about coming forwards with their criticism of the BBC and the younger Mr Murdoch’s recent tirade against public funded news coverage demonstrates his beliefs very clearly.   Rupert Murdoch has pledged his support for the Conservative party at the next election and the Conservative Party has made a pledge to look at the BBC’s charter.  Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt whilst speaking to the Financial Times was quoted as saying “We are looking into whether it would be appropriate to rip up the charter in the middle of it, or whether one should wait”.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see what the master plan is.  Newspaper publishing is fighting for very big stakes at the moment and the BBC offers a free alternative to those plans.

This leaves citizen journalism though and we are yet to see how this thorn is addressed by the fourth estate.

Also in the Guardian was another article Foreign media count cost of UK libel laws in which it announced that titles form overseas are considering whether to continue to publish in the UK.  This content is protected by laws of Freedom of Speech abroad does n not enjoy the same protection here and as such title owners are considering whether to block access to their sites and withdraw the foreign titles from circulation in the UK due to the threat of libel.

These all seem to me to be a classic case of an old world meeting new technology with new conflicts seemingly appearing every other day.  The Internet is very good at asking questions of an industry, it did it first for software and is currently asking questions of the music industry. The rule of thumb the Internet has proved time and time again is that the advance of new technology is as unstoppable as a tidal wave.  It is up to industry to adapt to technology or become obsolete.

Personally I don’t think that removing your content from Google is a great move, because the alternatives will not stop the story appearing.  It will only stop your point of view appearing, and I think being included in the conversation is better than not being included in the conversation.

Whether it is business models or the diversity of domestic law pertaining to an industry, the Internet is causing a dramatic rethink and more than likely a few sleepless nights for existing media owners.  If they do not accept that the broadcast model as we knew it is morphing into something new then they will be the ones who will increasingly marginalise themselves and therefore become increasingly irrelevant to the conversation.