My feature article in Bloom Magazine, “The Plight of Asylum Seekers,” took second place in the Society of Professional Journalists’ “Best in Indiana Journalism” competition for 2017, in the category of Best Investigative Reporting for small-circulation magazines. The graphics, by Joe Lee, also won second place in their category.
I’m honored.
Filed under magazine journalism, politics
I caught a BBC interview this morning with Richard Edelman, Chairman of Edelman Worldwide. He was speaking from the World Economic Forum in Davos, about the often-cited Edelman Trust Barometer, his company’s annual global survey on the trust and credibility of key institutions. Edelman himself looked shaken by the results of the 2018 Barometer. Here’s a link to the Executive Summary. I felt it was worth sharing.
Globally — but most especially in the US — there has been an unprecedented crash in trust in institutions, particularly media and government, and in information. People have no faith in the information they have been receiving, and in their own ability to distinguish real information from fake news. Nowhere is this collapse of trust more evident than in the US, where media are under attack from government as never before.
There is an interesting nuance to the fall of trust in media, however: Respondents view “media” as including the non-traditional online platforms, including social media, from which many people get most of their news and insights. But trust has fallen sharply both in social media as sources of truth and (tellingly) in the veracity of information gathered from “people like me” — peers in social networks. There is a substantial uptick in trust for experts, especially technical experts, and a downgrading of information populism. This reverses a several year trend of cynicism toward expertise, and distrust of the motives and credibility of experts. If accurate and sustained, this reversal could suggest a renewed interest in institutions like science and academia — in my opinion, a welcome and overdue development. Oh, and this includes journalists — respondents say they distrust media, but trust in journalists rose, year-on-year, more sharply than for any other group.
The 2018 Trust Barometer also measured a significant uptick in trust for business leaders, CEOs and brands. That’s the main reason I’m blogging about this.
One of the main forms of work product I generate for corporate clients is Thought Leadership content — bylined articles, white papers, eBooks, guest blog posts and the like. There is great demand for this kind of content because corporate-affiliated thought leaders have important ideas to convey, but little time to devote to writing. I help people who have this quandary to get their ideas out of their heads and into erudite prose.
Edelman’s 2018 Trust Barometer forces us to confront some dark realities about the global economy. But it also presents us with an opportunity: Globally, people are hungry for ideas, and increasingly are looking to thought leaders from the business community to provide them — including ideas that have little direct connection to your company’s commercial offerings, but for which you nonetheless have genuine authority by virtue of your institutional leadership.
The world is listening. You have knowledge to contribute. Your thought leadership content — already a key component of a realistic Content Marketing program — will find an increasingly receptive audience this year, and that can help increase Awareness and Audience Engagement with your brand. If I can help you to get your ideas out there, please let me know.
Filed under content marketing, politics, social media
“God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”
– Former Facebook President Sean Parker…describing Facebook
I wasn’t prescient enough to see the clouds of conscience beginning to gather over the social media industry, and Facebook in particular, before sentiments like these began to emanate from the social networks’ most intimate circle of friends.
But I had my own misgivings…
…and so much else about the social media experience.
So, when Facebook informed me, on Halloween, that it was the 10th anniversary of my joining the platform — of course, Facebook made me a little movie about it — rather than post the movie, I resolved once and for all to drop off Facebook. Which I did, a few days later.
When I started Peter Dorfman Creative Services almost four years ago, I anticipated that social media would represent an important outlet for the marketing content I proposed to write. Actually, I originally joined Facebook for business reasons — a prospective client insisted I join a group he had created. Honestly, though, Facebook has had barely any discernible impact on my business; it certainly hasn’t represented an important outlet for my work product.
I let friends know in advance that I was dropping off Facebook, and a surprising number indicated they were close to the same decision themselves. We’ll see. Facebook’s sticky. If you’re out on the ledge, wondering whether you can go through with this decision, relax. It’s nice out here in the real world. I’ll talk you through it.
Filed under politics, social media
An Iranian blogger offers an important observation (in slightly tangled English). The rise of video online is enabling demagogues, who would be laughed off the world stage by an audience that actually read.
Filed under social media
I made an observation back in February that content providers were losing control of the consumer’s experience as readers increasing found content by way of a search result page, as opposed to the provider’s own navigation. The content I was referencing was customer support documentation and knowledge base entries. Now comes evidence that the phenomenon is much broader.
Apparently what goes for marketers’ web sites also applies to The New York Times, and presumably other news portals. Zachary Seward in the blog Quartz reports that traffic on the Times’ home page, section fronts and even the mobile app is in freefall as readers access content from links pushed to them in social media, bypassing the news organization’s navigation. Habits are changing; people no longer sit down to read the news, but consume it largely in occasional bursts at various points during the day.
When it comes to content consumption, the reader clearly is in control, and is consuming in bite-sized snacks, pushed to him by acquaintances in social media. Is the home page really dead? I doubt it, but it’s increasingly becoming an afterthought.
Filed under content marketing, social media
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