I don't know where you get your "news" from anymore, but for me it's rarely from a "News" paper.
Twitter and Facebook are my primary sources of news, followed slightly slowly thereafter by online news sites. Last and, certainly, least it's my morning "News" paper.
As communication vehicles change, our use of them changes too. I followed the London Riots coverage last year on Twitter. It was at least a couple of hours ahead of the BBC in their "on the ground" coverage and the "eye witness" reports were breathtakingly real. I recall one gentleman updating regularly on the incident that was unfolding just several feet away from his home and the fear and urgency in his 140 character tweets was palpable.
I didn't need to read about it in the newspaper the next day. I felt like I'd already been there and experienced them first hand.
Facebook is great for picking up feature stories that you might not have seen in print - and a good story, by its very nature, is viral - that ancient human art of story telling is not dead. It just exists now in the form of a "Share" button or a Retweet.
So where does the future of the traditional "news" paper sit in all of this?
Advertisers are shifting away from print in droves, taking with them the not insignificant funding they'd once happily provided. Just a few weeks ago, Proctor & Gamble, that bastion of print and broadcast advertising, announced they are cutting 1600 jobs, many of them in marketing, because "facebook and google can be more efficient than traditional media". That's got to hurt.
And hurt it does. Newspapers are shedding journalists at a faster rate than ever before.
So what do you do when your readership is dwindling, your ad sales are struggling and everyone's using other mediums to obtain news?
You panic.
That certainly seems to be the answer that many publishing houses have come up with. Let's try something, anything, to keep going. Doesn't matter what it is.
Which might explain the rash of "me too" daily deal sites launched by established newspapers in recent months.
Inspired by the money making runaway success that is Groupon, publishers are connecting up the obvious dots of Advertiser + Audience = Money.
The Scotsman's having a fling with DealMonster.co.uk, publishing giant DC Thomson's flogging us Beezer Deals, while in other countries the same thing is happening: The Washington Post is promoting Find n Save and there are many more titles across the planet that are doing the very same thing.
Lord help the marketing industry if this is all we're left with as a primary means of reaching consumers. Second only to giving your product away free, it's the most expensive form of advertising I have ever encountered.
Yet, regardless of all this fervent "activity" to generate cash, these publishing houses are missing one key point. Readership figures continue to dwindle. And the reason why? They are no longer selling us news. It's old news.
In fact the situation is so troubling that a site ominously entitled "Newspaper Death Watch" reports that according to academics there will only be four newspapers left in the USA in just five years, wiping out the other 1400 which currently serve that country with their news content. The UK is no different.
Newspapers need to focus on what they bring to the public that no other medium can and does. Advertisers are only interested in one thing at the end of the day: reach. So whether that's in print or online, we want to get our products in front of people. That's why newsprint advertising was so successful for years - they put us on the breakfast table of millions of people every day.
No daily deal site is going to achieve that in the long term. There's a limit to how many daily deal sites we will sign up to as consumers, and to how many deals we want to consume in an average day. I suspect I am not alone in spending the first five minutes of the day deleting several deal offers from my inbox.
So come on Newsprint - we need you to innovate. We don't want to lose you. We still like the experience and the in-depth leisurely read of a newspaper, and with all that attention your product gets, your advertising is bound to be effective, just rethink the content of your core product and stop faffing about with unsustainable diversions.
Or you might just wake up one day and be too late.
It's London Fashion Week this week. This means that next week we'll be told that green is the new black. Or grey. Or some other colour of the rainbow.
Trends change, and so it is true in business. Increasingly, I'm finding that businesses are using "can't" as the new "won't".
As someone who finds the word "can't" hard to compute at the best of times, and prefers to use the English language with a little more precision than the general populace, I have to say I don't like this new trend very much at all.
My husband was told last week that one of his suppliers "can't" send out product samples. Can't? Or won't? Surely they have samples of the products they manufacture? They've just chosen not to respond to any sample requests.
I've had experience of a hotel restaurant that "can't" serve up a bacon roll. However they "can" serve up the bacon and roll separately, they are just not allowed to put them together. Bonkers.
This week I came across a hotel that "can't" sell me a room at the same rate as it appears on the internet. How come? Why not?
In recent months I've also come across a company that "can't" put through the order for processing until the money has been received - but whose credit control processes rely on waiting weeks for other companies to respond to a laborious, and somewhat old fashioned, trade reference process causing unnecessary delays and irritation to both us and our client. Can't? Really? Won't is more like.
In so many of these situations the companies "can" but instead of being up front about their strange and unhelpful internal policy decisions, they are hiding, cowering, behind the word "can't".
"Can't" is less assertive than "won't" - it may fill the recipient of the message with a sense of despair and irritation, but it's unlikely to incur the wrath that a more assertive "won't" would. "Can't" implies that the decision is someone else's responsibility altogether.
However if businesses are not able to explain, justify and stand firmly behind their own policies by owning them, then why do they even bother employing people to answer the phone or manage their customer services?
So fight back. The next time you're told you "can't", tell them that they can and they are just choosing not to and ask why.
My husband did just that. After kicking up a fuss, he was put through to the owner of the company who quickly backed down and agreed to send out the samples.
I did just that. After challenging the "can't" - surely you mean "won't"? - I was happily offered the internet rate saving me a cool £35 per night. Good little customer service person.
Can't? We just won't stand for it.
Core to marketing is communication. And social media is now the dominant communication vehicle in the world. But despite that indisputable fact there are still businesses (and business people) who refuse to get involved, whether through stubborn ignorance or sheer dogmatic arrogance.
Businesses who think it's a flash in the pan. Businesses who are afraid their customers might just (publicly) talk back to them. Businesses who are stuck in the past. Businesses who might genuinely have no place in the future.
Last week I used Facebook to arrange a meeting with a client, Twitter to discuss a joint pitch opportunity and Google+ to issue a press announcement. One of our Winter Camp businesses had their first hot sales enquiry for the training of a lot of people via Twitter before our 4 week course in how to maximise its use for marketing purposes had finished. If arranging new business meetings, generating leads and discussing business growth opportunities are not enough of a reason to be involved in these social networks, I don't know what is.
The thing is, I've never believed Facebook or Twitter are destination sites (like MySpace and Bebo were). I always saw them as highly sophisticated communication tools.
I didn't start using Facebook and Twitter because they were "social", I started using them because they enabled me to communicate with a lot of people, simultaneously and therefore save me an inordinate amount of time. Just like our mobile phones contain our address books and enable us to connect at the touch of a button, so do Facebook and Twitter.
I spend time on Facebook and Twitter because they enable me to interact, communicate and contact people when it is convenient for all of us. And that's the underlying key to their success.
Unlike the phone or a text which is an interruptive force in our lives, people log in to Facebook and Twitter when it suits them and respond in their own time. That's why people like it so much. They are in control of both the incoming communications, and the outgoing.
So if your business currently has only a telephone number, fax number and email address, you are cutting yourself off to literally millions of customers who tweet, facebook and G+ their way in the world.
Why would any business person in their right mind, cut themselves off from the marketplace?
You may as well save yourselves the time and stress of business failure and shut up shop now. Or take half an hour out, hop on those sites and try them out.
It's free, and costs nothing but your time and an open mind.
