Media Usage per Person Drops for First Time in a Decade

Consumers Are More Efficient With Their Time, Thanks to Growing Web Use

By Emily Tan

Published: Advertising Age - August 07, 2007

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Media outlets may be increasing rapidly each day but consumption is another story. For the first time since 1997, U.S. consumers spent less time using media in 2006 compared to the previous year. Media usage per person declined 0.5% to 3,530 hours. This drop is mainly attributed to changing consumer behaviors and advances in the digital space, according to data by Veronis Suhler Stevenson.

VSS's forecast report projects internet advertising, which includes pure-play websites and digital extensions of traditional media, will replace newspapers as the largest ad medium in 2011.

"There's more and more media, and I don't think we really believe people are less interested in media," said Jim Rutherford, exec VP-managing director, VSS. "But one of the phenomena is the way people consume media is and has been changing for a while over time."

Web to replace newspapers
But in the VSS Communications Industry Forecast 2007-2011 -- its 21st edition of the report on media spending, usage and trends -- total communications spending in 2006 jumped 6.8%to $885.2 billion. This year's report projects this growth trend will continue over the next five years with internet advertising, which includes pure-play websites and digital extensions of traditional media, replacing newspapers as the largest ad medium in 2011.

Because of the high demand for quick updates and short news briefs readily available on the web, consumers now rely less on 30-minute broadcast or cable TV news shows and spend less time reading the Sunday paper, dropping time with ad-supported media 6.3%. But it isn't that consumers are no longer using media, they are just spending less time with it.

"Now they're consuming news through a faster means," Mr. Rutherford said. "They can download shows and watch shows on TiVo, or they might watch a clip of 'The Tonight Show With Jay Leno' instead the whole hour to catch the funny clip that everyone loves."

Even though consumers are spending less time with media last year, media usage on the institutional front -- including conferences, trade shows and business-to-business publications -- rose 3.2% to 260 hours per user. With its first-ever analysis of business and government media usage in the recent VSS Forecast, the bump in institutional sector is because more people want to search for knowledge about jobs rather than the new latest product release.

Knowledge economy
"The economy as a whole is more and more driven by knowledge than manufacturing," Mr. Rutherford said. "Knowledge is the key to success. Knowing this is a competitive edge. [People] need info that's as accurate and timely."

VSS categorizes the communications industry into four major end-user sections -- advertising, marketing, consumer and institutional -- as well as 19 different subsections where those end-users spend their money. According to the report, the institutional sector was the fastest-growing in 2001-2006 periods at a compound annual growth rate of 6.9% and made $226.9 billion in 2006.

Marketing became the largest communications sector, reaching $254 billion last year. However, advertising was the slowest-growing sector in the five-year period, as the rise in marketing and public relations came at the expense of broadcast TV, newspapers and general-interest magazines.

Targeted media
"In the overall advertising area, dollars are moving from advertising to targeted media," Mr. Rutherford said. "They're not willing to pay for broadcast TV advertising. Dollars have come into the targeted media, and the dollars shrink because the targeted media is more efficient."

At the rate that communications spending is going, VSS projects that spending in 2007 will increase 6.4% to more than $900 billion, and will grow to over 1.2 trillion in 2011. And with the rise of the digital space, VSS expects total internet advertising to reach about $62 billion in the next five years and will surpass newspapers as the country's largest medium.

10 Tips for Choosing a Domain Name

By Anita Campbell

Published: Inc. Technology

A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but if your business name isn't followed by a dot-com your customers may never find your business.

Does your choice of domain name for your website really matter?

I’ll say it does!

Your domain name is like your street address. How will customers find you if they don’t know where to look -- or worse, if they go to what they think is your address only to find your company is not there? Here are ten tips to choosing a domain name for your business:

1. Make it a dot-com -- Henry Ford is rumored to have said about his Model T Ford that you could have it in any color “so long as it’s black.” That same attitude pretty much sums up one naming philosophy: choose any domain name, so long as it’s a “.com” extension. In the United States, most people typing in a domain name will type “.com” by default. With over 70 million registered URLs, the “.com” extension is by far the most popular, with “.net”, “.org”, and ”.info” lagging far behind in popularity, according to the ICANN Wiki.

2. Short and easy to spell -- Shorter is better. A short URL is easier to remember and less likely to be misspelled than a long one. For obvious reasons, avoid any domain name that by its nature is hard to spell or confusing.

3. Company names and brand names -- Whenever possible, register your company name as your main URL. It’s what people usually try first when looking for your business website. You might also consider registering your product/service names as additional URLs. The reason? Some companies now create mini-sites specifically for products and services -- think Jif.com or Tide.com. Or they point the product URL to a section of their main website that features that product.

4. Keywords and household words -- Some companies register industry-specific terms, common words or short phrases that your customers or prospective customers may commonly type into a browser. According to Monte Cahn, CEO of Moniker.com, “Seventy percent of people type directly in the browser address field, while the other 30 percent go through a search engine.” This has increased the value of domains that are household words, easy-to-remember phrases, or keywords. Domain names such as Autos.com and Seniors.com sold for more than $1 million each, he says.

5. Personal names -- Register your own first and last name as your URL if you are a consultant, writer, or other professional whose reputation in your field is critical to drawing customers. Think TomPeters.com. You have several options here. For instance, you can use your personal name as your business domain. Or, you can point your personal-name URL to a separate company website. Either way, people looking for you are more likely to also find your business website.

6. Be defensive with misspellings -- Buy up common misspellings of your domain name. That way, you don’t leave traffic on the table -- and competitors won’t be able to buy the misspelled domains and siphon off traffic intended for your site. According to Cahn, try this method to find misspellings: Get a number of people in your office to type in your domain name 100 times each in a browser. If you don’t have employees, get your family and friends involved. Keep track of every mistyped URL. Those are the URLs you want to buy and point to your site.

7. Protect your brand with other extensions -- While the “.com” extension is the most popular, as a defensive measure consider also snapping up other extensions of your domain name. Secure the .net, .info, .biz and similar extensions. If you do business internationally, think about securing country extensions, also (such as .co.uk).

8. Don’t forget mobile -- With mobile devices becoming more popular, big brands are starting to register and develop their .mobi sites specifically for mobile users. So do what the big boys do and register that .mobi. You may have no plans to build out a .mobi site today. But as mobile usage grows you may be glad you have that domain in two or three years.

9. Avoid long hyphenated URLs -- Ochool of thought in vogue a few years ago was to register domain names with strings of keywords separated by hyphens. The reason? It was thought that you could get higher rankings in the search engines if these keywords were in your URL. This approach led to some ridiculously long URLs prone to misspellings and confusion. This approach has fallen out of favor in most camps, as it is not clear that search engines give any preference to hyphenated keyword URLs.

10. Register domains for as long as possible -- A final word of advice: secure your main domain names for a minimum of several years so they don’t expire out from under you. Ten years is best. What’s $89 (the current cost of a 10-year registration through GoDaddy.com) when your company’s entire Web presence is at stake?

The larger domain name registrars will send pre-expiration reminders or even automatically renew on your behalf. Sign up for these protections whenever available. Be especially careful when using smaller resellers of domain names, as they may not offer these expiration-avoidance features. More than one small business owner I know has been rudely surprised by an expired domain.

Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.

Dell Quells Critics With Web 2.0 Tack

Social Media Has Turned Customer Service Inside-out for All to See

By Matthew Creamer

Published: Advertising Age - June 11, 2007

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Back in the summer of 2005, Dell ignored Jeff Jarvis' complaints about a lemon laptop at its own peril. The blogger's "Dell Hell" rants teed up a mainstream story starring the PC manufacturer as an arrogant giant that became a case study in how one man's website could shred a corporate reputation.

Influential blogger Jeff Jarvis was once ignored by Dell when he complained about his laptop. Now the mammoth computer company has a forum for customers like Jarvis to air grievances and share product ideas.

Now Dell, working to shrug off that image and right recent business declines, might be on to a different kind of web-based watershed. In mid-February, it launched IdeaStorm, a place for customers to submit suggestions about its products that's become the repository for more than 5,500 recommendations and 24,000 comments. The community has already inspired 21 initiatives, much to the delight of observers such as Mr. Jarvis. Even he has softened a bit toward Dell.

Behold the present and future of customer service, a business function best understood as a one of those survival games where someone is dropped off in the middle of a forest sans map or compass and told to find his way home. As practiced by many companies, it now puts the average consumer through a dark wood of computerized directories, callbacks that never come and barely comprehensible customer reps with no real authority or information.

Faster conduit
That game is nearing an end due to a simple fact of the digital era: The back-and-forth between companies and consumers, once contained in frustrated phone calls and letter-writing, is now being played out in public. The growth of consumer-generated media -- not just YouTube videos but the millions and millions of bits of product feedback floating in the web ether -- means that the little-used suggestion box nailed to the boss' door (long a symbol of corporate inertia) has been digitized and turned inside-out for the world to see.

"The customer-service function is extending into realm of social media, said Max Kalehoff, VP-marketing at Nielsen Buzzmetrics. "It's customer service becoming the new-media department, getting as close to the core of those experiences that prompt positive or negative media for brands."

More and more companies are seeing the benefits of what Sam Decker, a former Dell executive and VP-marketing and products at Bazaarvoice, calls "social commerce." For instance, recently rebranded Delta, part of an industry with notoriously low customer satisfaction, has created a website, Change.Delta.com, that hosts suggestions from consumers -- "Bigger blankets, please" -- as well as polls about features and offerings.

Companies in consumer tech, including Dell, HP and Toshiba and nine other industries have tapped Mr. Decker's firm to manage product reviews on their e-commerce sites. Mr. Decker said clients are often initially looking to use reviews to drive sales conversions, but "there's an evolution."

"It's like breathing customer oxygen into your company," he said. "It's operationalizing the customer voice. Sales and customer-service training can be based on what customers are saying. Product and brand managers, copywriters, online and e-mail marketers can all use it. The challenge is: How far can you take it to change your marketing strategy?"

Walking media channels
That, of course, means the strict boundaries between consumer affairs, PR, marketing and product development become about as useful as a Commodore 64. "The interplay [between these functions] just gets tighter and tighter as more and more people and companies realize that they themselves are walking media channels, able to freely produce and disseminate content on a whim," said Gur Tsabar, VP-new media strategies at PR firm Ketchum.

Realizing this, Dell made sure its social-media initiatives cut across disciplines and business units. Michael Dell, whose inspiration for IdeaStorm came from a similar site at Salesforce.com's, and other senior managers get the top ideas sent to them. IT, corporate communications, e-commerce and corporate marketing group are just some of the functions involved in it.

"You can't do digital media from one group with one point of view on the world," said Bob Pearson, VP-corporate group communications at Dell. "It just doesn't work. In fact, that's too marketing-oriented. There's a big difference between pushing your story out vs. becoming relevant in customers' conversations."

Mr. Pearson said that the community aspect of IdeaStorm, which allows users to vote ideas up or down and post comments, gives the company depth of insight into its customers' priorities and allows it to listen for a long period of time. "With the average focus group, you go in for an hour or two, give them some sandwiches and leave. We may be listening to conversation going on over two months. It's a totally different game."

Ubuntu triumphs
Right after IdeaStorm's launch, the ever-vocal Linux community got active, demanding the open-source operating system be pre-installed on Dell computers. After conducting a detailed survey answered by more than 100,000 people, Dell selected notebooks and desktops equipped with the Linux-based Ubuntu. Last week, Dell kicked off an effort to create the most eco-friendly PC, and guess where it's soliciting ideas for how to go about it?

IdeaStorm is part of an effort "to make sure the customer is walking the hallways at Dell," in Mr. Pearson's words. It also includes blogging, through its Direct2Dell site, getting involved in online conversations about the company, and dealing with the complaints of angry customers who make that dissatisfaction clear on blogs, chat rooms, bulletin boards and the like.

Asked what impact this had on the Dell's image, Mr. Pearson has a radically transparent response: "That's a question for the community."

An unscientific survey of the blogosphere shows this work has made some difference, even if Dell, recently unseated as the No.1 PC-manufacturer by Hewlett-Packard, still has its work cut out for it. One party it's moved the needle with is Mr. Jarvis, who in April wrote a cautiously-optimistic 1,800-word Buzzmachine post based on a recent visit to Dell's campus.

"This isn't just crowdsourcing," he wrote. "This is crowdmanaging. Companies still fear this. But, hell, if even Dell can lean back and let its customers begin to take charge, anyone can."