File this in the "we-try-it-out-so-you-don't-have-to" category. So.cl is a derivative social network that may be useful to students, but it won't fly elsewhere.

Over the weekend, Microsoft opened to the public an experimental social network called So.cl. It's a mix between Google+ and Storify. Users are encouraged to search for information about a particular topic, then compile the best results - textual content, images and videos - into a single post. So.cl, which launched in beta at the end of last year, is initially targeted to students. It may end up being useful to that market, but it's unlikely to get traction as a mainstream social network. Here's why...

Down with citizen journalism!

Long live citizen journalism!

Remember the passionately earnest debate about whether citizens manning the keyboards were either the future or end of journalism?

I’m not certain exactly when the debate’s embers went cold, but the first entry under Google search is a Wikipedia article, most of which was written in the previous decade, and the next two entries go back to 2006 and 2005. A fitting capstone is what’s happened at The Columbia Missourian, produced by students and staff at the Missouri School of Journalism. The Missourian – a pioneer advocate for citizen journalism — has finally integrated community contributions onto its main site after keeping them in a ghetto for seven years on a site called MyMissourian.  (The integration is actually only about 90% complete. Reader contributions are still kept antiseptically separate from staff work — on pages under a READERS tab, and they still have to go through a gate-keeping editor.)

So, has citizen journalism won?

One argument-ending answer is this recent contribution — video, photos and text — to The Missourian on “storm chasing” by community contributor Dustin Mazzio, It’s a compelling package that any site would die for. The most skilled regular-issue journalist writing a third-person account could never match what Mazzio produced (“We could feel the inflow as well as see the wind blowing across the crops in front of us, sucking what it could up into the storm”). Mazzio is a professional too — a storm chaser who tracks storms and helps people caught in them.

In every community there are scores, hundreds, of people who have special expertise like Mazzio, and if they were mobilized could give a whole new face to community journalism.

There will always be room for regular journalists, who have been trained in the craft of finding information and the art of fashioning it into narratives that may not be as gripping as Mazzio’s first-person story but can throw a searchlight on community problems that need fixing.

There’s ample room for both, and any site will be improved by having both. Clyde Bentley, a professor at the Missouri School and founder of MyMissourian, told me: “The traditional media, when stripped to the bones, must maintain its role as the eyes of the public on government and civic life.  While dispassionate government coverage is often boring, it is vital to society. What citizen journalism can do, when included in a traditional outlet’s mix, is provide some of the softer side of news that takes the edge off of the daily dose of meetings and mayhem.”

But what about going further and putting these two forces together at the community level? There can be a synergistic 1 + 1 = 3. A site that can do that will attract readers and advertisers who want to reach them.

Take health care. But that’s a national issue, isn’t it? Or is it? People don’t go to Washington, D.C., to see their doctor, get an MRI or to be hospitalized. Add up all those local activities and you get the ever-growing $2.6 trillion annual bill for health care. What’s worse is that all these costs vary wildly from community to community and for no logical reasons. Imagine if hyperlocal sites would tell the story of health care in their community – documenting whether it was more or less costly than the average (with adjustments for regional cost of living)?

This is, to be sure, a complex story. But it could be put together if professional and citizen journalists could tackle it from different angles.

The first place to go would be the local Accountable Care Organization, a voluntary group of doctors, hospitals and other providers who collaborate with the goal of improving the quality of care of Medicare patients while also eliminating unnecessary expenses, with all parties sharing in the cost savings. ACOs, part of Obamacare, focus on Medicare because this federal service accounts for 20% of all health costs, and it covers the fast-growing senior population. (Washington Post Wonkblog staffer Sarah Kliff’s reporting on this issue is a great resource to send hyperlocal editors in the right direction.)

The editor of a local site can get the ball rolling by finding which providers are on the local ACO, and inviting them to contribute to a new section that could be titled “Our Health Care Bill for Seniors.” Questions to put to ACO members:

• How can ACOs improve the quality of care – in doctors’ offices and at hospitals
• How do we know that cost cutting won’t include cutting into quality?
• If the ACO works, how much will it save in our community?
• Will some of the savings be invested in improving care locally?
• Do average citizens have a real voice in ACOs?

These are questions to which seniors, and their children and other relatives — indeed the entire community — will want to know the answers. These answers will make great stories for the local website.

It’s possible that some communities don’t yet have an ACO. If not, the website editor should find out why. Is the organization being boycotted by one or more providers who don’t like the rules set up by the feds? If the answer is yes, then the editor can ask the boycotter to explain its action, and get reactions from other local parties. So either way, there’s a story – and if there’s no ACO because it’s being boycotted by one or more local providers, that could be a big story with ramifications for both quality and cost of care.

This is just one example of how citizen journalism can be reinvented to help communities not only become better informed but better places to live – and get quality health care at an affordable cost. Education reform – which is not far behind health care in local importance – is another. The list could go on.

The question is, are community sites ready to take the lead in reinventing citizen journalism to produce a 1 + 1 = 3?

Tom Grubisich authors

The New News column for Street Fight. He is editorial director of LocalAmerica, which is developing a Web site to rank communities on their livability across 20-plus categories. The rankings will be dynamic, going up and down daily as they are updated through a combination of open data, journalism and feedback from local experts and users of the site.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Keith Williamson.

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Learn more about the science of success with Heidi Grant Halvorson's HBR Single, based on this blog post.

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. "Lose 5 pounds" is a better goal than "lose some weight," because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you'll "eat less" or "sleep more" is too vague — be clear and precise. "I'll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights" leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you've actually done it.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Given how busy most of us are, and how many goals we are juggling at once, it's not surprising that we routinely miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice them. Did you really have no time to work out today? No chance at any point to return that phone call? Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., "If it's Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I'll work out for 30 minutes before work.") Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. If you don't know how well you are doing, you can't adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

4. Be a realistic optimist. When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But whatever you do, don't underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal. Most goals worth achieving require time, planning, effort, and persistence. Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won't improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential. People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.

6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The good news is, if you aren't particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don't have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking .... well, there's no way to put this nicely: you are wrong. As I mentioned earlier, effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed. Embracing this knowledge will not only help you see yourself and your goals more accurately, but also do wonders for your grit.

7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control "muscle" is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn't get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.

To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you'd honestly rather not do. Give up high-fat snacks, do 100 sit-ups a day, stand up straight when you catch yourself slouching, try to learn a new skill. When you find yourself wanting to give in, give up, or just not bother — don't. Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur ("If I have a craving for a snack, I will eat one piece of fresh or three pieces of dried fruit.") It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier, and that's the whole point. As your strength grows, you can take on more challenges and step-up your self-control workout.

8. Don't tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it's important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Don't try to take on two challenging tasks at once, if you can help it (like quitting smoking and dieting at the same time). And don't put yourself in harm's way — many people are overly-confident in their ability to resist temptation, and as a result they put themselves in situations where temptations abound. Successful people know not to make reaching a goal harder than it already is.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won't do. Do you want to successfully lose weight, quit smoking, or put a lid on your bad temper? Then plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Research on thought suppression (e.g., "Don't think about white bears!") has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken.

If you want to change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead? For example, if you are trying to gain control of your temper and stop flying off the handle, you might make a plan like "If I am starting to feel angry, then I will take three deep breaths to calm down." By using deep breathing as a replacement for giving in to your anger, your bad habit will get worn away over time until it disappears completely.

It is my hope that, after reading about the nine things successful people do differently, you have gained some insight into all the things you have been doing right all along. Even more important, I hope are able to identify the mistakes that have derailed you, and use that knowledge to your advantage from now on. Remember, you don't need to become a different person to become a more successful one. It's never what you are, but what you do.

Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is a motivational psychologist, and author of the new book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals (Hudson Street Press, 2011). She is also an expert blogger on motivation and leadership for Fast Company and Psychology Today. Her personal blog, The Science of Success, can be found at www.heidigranthalvorson.com. Follow her on Twitter @hghalvorson

 

At the beginning of March, California’s Los Angeles Times joined a scrum of US newspapers that decided paywalls would be the press’ salvation. But the mighty Pulitzer Prize-winning paper is no longer the press it once was.

Starting in the sixties and peaking in the nineties and early 2000s, the Los Angeles Times would win a clutch of journalism’s most prestigious awards, but then came the ‘deals from hell’ and the paper became a sinking ship. Heads rolled and editors left as the men in suits ruthlessly cut jobs at the paper to safeguard investor interests.

“I've been trying for days to quit the Times, but I cannot seem to do it. In the first place, every time I announce I'm leaving, a more senior editor ups and quits and grabs all the attention, and, in the second place, I do not know anymore who my editor is, who the editor is, who the publisher is, and who owns the company. I think it's the Chicago Tribune, although that might not be the case, either, by the end of the day, since the paper is for sale, or being auctioned,” writer Richard Cohen wrote in a column for Slate.

“I walk the halls with my resignation in my hands. It is a brief document, rather nicely written, I think, but either I cannot find anyone to read it or those who do simply shrug, say something like, ‘Get in line,’ or, because they are in the Internet or TV section of the company, cannot read at all. I mean, they're functionally literate, if words like ‘functionality’ can be considered literate, but they never get the meaning of things. All they ever say is, ‘Reboot, reboot’.”

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Good parables like this should be told from the very beginning, because they serve as exemplars of how journalistic excellence can be screwed by greed. Once upon a time many of the great American newspapers were owned by private families.

The New York Times, for example, is still run by the offspring of Adolph Ochs, an intellectual-cum-refugee-cum-printers apprentice who ended up buying the paper in 1896. The Ochs Sulzberger family is said to be traditional, and treat The New York Times as the clan’s “reason to exist, initiating younger members in its ways and holding gatherings to discuss it”.

Similarly, the LA Times became successful under the editorship of Harrison Gray Otis in the 1800s. After his death, a family – the Chandlers – were the newspaper’s publishers for generations. The sixties were a golden era for the newspaper when Otis Chandler believed that the newsroom was "the heartbeat of the business”. This ideal saw the publisher reinvest in quality journalism, bagging four Pulitzers, more than it had won in almost a hundred years.

But trouble started brewing in 2000 when the Chandlers decided to sell their centurial company the Tribune Company for $8.3-billion plus some cash, stocks and a few seats on the board. Respected media critic for The New Yorker, Ken Auletta, kept a careful eye on the deal saying that initially the Times’ newsroom in Los Angeles welcomed the new owners, but that this enthusiasm soon gave way to embarrassment.

The reason for the shame was “a special edition of the Times’ Sunday magazine devoted” to the opening of the Staples Centre, a sports and entertainment arena with which the newspapers’ publishers had negotiated a profit-sharing plan. “The arrangement, which was kept secret from the paper’s editor until shortly before publication, gave Staples half the advertising revenues for this supposedly independent journalistic enterprise. The Times and its top management had been humiliated,” Auletta wrote.

Tension grew between the Los Angeles Times’ editor, John S. Carroll, and the new owners. Eventually the newsman who had helped the newspaper win 13 Pulitzer Prizes left in 2005. Caroll confided in Auletta that he was tired of the Tribune Company’s “incessant cost-cutting”.

“He believed that, on the contrary, investing in the newspaper would eventually produce higher profits, which was what the company eagerly sought, and that cutting costs, while it would temporarily improve the bottom line, would erode the paper and might someday destroy it. Carroll and the Tribune Company had been arguing about these issues for five years. The resolution would now be left to his successor.”

That successor was Dean Baquet who was Carroll’s second-in-command, but he was forced out very soon after defying orders from the Tribune’s money-men to cut costs by cutting jobs. In the five years since Tribune took over, the Times had chopped the paper’s talent by over 20%. Baquet said no more and was out the door, and in came James O’Shea. No prizes for guessing what happened to O’Shea. He left two years later in 2008 after refusing to slash the newsroom’s budget. With the revolving editorial door turning non-stop, the Los Angeles Times’ circulation plummeted. 

However, O’Shea would get his own back by writing a book about the Tribune Company called The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers. O’Shea wrote: “Like a lot of people at the time, I was willing to try something, anything, other than what we were doing, which was to just keep cutting costs as the products became less and less appealing to our readers.”

When it comes to laying blame for the destruction of papers like the Los Angeles Times, O’Shea is more than frank. “The lack of investment, the greed, the incompetence, corruption, hypocrisy and downright arrogance of people who put their interests ahead of the public’s are responsible for the state of the newspaper industry today,” his book reads.

More pain was pending for the Los Angeles Times, and it arrived in December 2007 in the form of a foul-mouthed, brutish real estate billionaire called Sam Zell. Like many of the moguls who destroy media companies, Zell had never owned a newspaper in his life, but this didn’t deter him from setting his sights on the Tribune.

Photo: Sam Zell. REUTERS/Fred Prouser.

A lack of media experience only served to embolden Zell who positioned himself as an “expert” in journalism from the get-go. “I’m sick and tired of listening to everybody talk about and commiserating about the end of newspapers. They ain’t ended. And they’re not going to be,” Zell lamented at a press conference to announce the deal, which he labelled “a very low-risk investment”.

Zell’s master plan was to put himself at the helm of the company and take the Tribune Company private with the help of an employee stock purchase plan. However, unlike all his real estate deals, Zell didn’t risk much of his own money, although he did share the risk of the take-over with all the company’s employees. Very soon Tribune was $13-billion in debt.

And then there’s the management “talent” Zell brought to the party. There are wonderful anecdotes about the “talent” Zell hired to help run his new media company. People like Randy Michaels who shortly after the Zell buy-out tried to impress his new colleagues at Tribune by offering a waitress at a hotel $100 to show him her breasts.

The Tribune Company went broke almost a year to the day after Zell had acquired it. But Zell did make news for helping create what is the biggest bankruptcy in US media history. These and other debacles that have beset US journalism are part of the reason why some media are eschewing the “attraction” of public listings and bonehead management like Zell and Michaels to create non-profits. The other reason is that good investigative journalism has been seriously affected by the recession and the fall-out from journalism that serves the church of the shareholder.

ProPublica is a sterling example of this. Enabled by an endowment from Golden West Financial, some of those fine folks who gave the US the subprime crisis, ProPublica writes big, important stories and gives them away to the likes of The New York Times for free. The outfit is run by a journalism supremo, one Paul Steiger, a former Wall Street Journal senior editor whose tenure there realised 16 Pulitzer Prizes.

But let’s go back to the Tribune, the owners of the Los Angeles Times, a company that former editor O’Shea says has leaders that put profits before Pulitzers. "Instead of developing strategies to produce the kind of content that would protect their most important asset — the public trust — they depreciated it like an aging Linotype."

Since Tribune declared bankruptcy in December 2008 it has racked up well over $233.3-million in legal fees, after a class action suit was brought against the company’s employees because of Zell’s “very low-risk investment”.

Last December the Los Angeles Times lost yet another editor who, after cutting the paper’s staff from 900 to about 550, could take no more. Sam Zell remains one of the richest men in the US and made the Forbes’ rich list yet again last year with a net worth of $4.7-billion.

And, the Los Angeles Times’ pay wall plans? Do you think this is going to turn things around for the paper?

Ask yourself whether the Los Angeles Times is the kind of newspaper you’d invest in so that you might read it on your iPad? We both know the answer to that question. DM

[The next instalment looks at those good guys of journalism, the Guardian. Unlike other newspapers whose profits are sucked out of operations by shareholders, The Guardian reinvests profits to “sustain journalism that is free from commercial or political interference”.]

Read more:

• Sam Zell Blames Tribune Failure on 'Greedy' Journalists in Forbes.
• Tribune Paid Bankruptcy Advisers $233 Million Since Filing for Protection in Bloomberg.
• No Exit – One man's desperate attempt to quit the Los Angeles Times by Richard Cohen in Slate.
• Los Angeles Times joins the crowd, erects pay wall for the news online in The Christian Science Monitor.

Photo: The vaulted gates to the LA Times. REUTERS/Fred Prouse.

This post was co-authored with Bob Moesta, Managing Partner of The Re-Wired Group in Detroit. While it's written from my perspective, he was central to the development of the idea.

"How's your book launch coming?" Bob asked me.

"Ugh. I don't want to talk about my book. Can't we just dive into working on another post about progress?" I said, trying to avoid my towering pre-publication checklist.

"Sure, Whitney. But if you're going to write about progress, you might want to make some."

Okay. Bob didn't actually say that, but he could have. Six months before publication, I found myself skittering off to new ideas rather than attending to the task right in front of me. Why was I procrastinating?, I wondered. Writing a book has been on my bucket list for years. I knew how important it was to have a successful launch, yet here I was doing nothing.

So with Bob's help, I started to analyze what was happening within the framework of our theoretical Equation of Progress. We would examine my stalled plans in order to better understand how people make progress, and more specifically, what leads us to innovate.

We had hypothesized that progress could only be made if the push of a situation (a frustration or problem to be solved) and the pull of an enticing new idea were greater than the forces holding us back — our allegiance to past behavior (the status quo) and anxiety.

Certainly, I had experienced a "pull" to write the book. Dare, Dream, Do was inspired by my interactions with people who weren't sure they had a dream, or worse, who didn't believe it was their privilege to dream. And there was obviously a "push" because I finished writing the book. Deadlines are good that way. But the prospect of now tackling a lengthy punch list — build a website, create a speaker's sheet, film a speaker's reel, record an audio Q&A, finalize/plead for blurbs, finalize copy edits, write an e-book to accompany the book — obscured my vision of a future where readers would hold the book in their hands and be inspired to dream. The eventual payoff of completing these tasks wasn't immediately enticing enough to overcome my present inertia, i.e. allegiance to the status quo. No wonder I wasn't making progress.

That all changed when anxiety kicked in about at four months to pub date. I had always thought of procrastination as a bad actor, anxiety even worse. But in analyzing what I thought were merely stall tactics, I've come to realize that the anxiety caused by procrastination is actually a critical component to innovation. Research supports this. Anxiety, in the right quantities, can propel us forward. According to the Journal of Management, NASA scientists and engineers found that performance increases as deadlines shorten, but when the deadlines became too short, performance declined. Dr. Ellen F. Weber, award-winning founder of Mita Brain Center, states: "while frustration or fear can flood the brain with cortisol, if anxiety is managed properly, anticipation can produce that feel-good dopamine that primes the pump of progress, or innovation." In other words, as the deadline neared, my apprehension around the to-do list actually wasn't just outweighed by the pull of the commitments I'd made to my editor, publicist, and to myself, the anxiety per se helped increase the pull.

The innovations, or newly introduced ideas and methods, that have emerged from my anxiety around the book launch include:

1) View the book as a product. I realized my anxiety was caused, in part, by the unfamiliar experience of launching a book. By reframing it as being analogous to launching a business, I talked myself down. I've never published a book before, but I have incubated businesses. When you're overwhelmed by a new project, look to your past for similar problems you've already solved. Just as a business model is required to maximize the reach of a simplifying technology, so too is a business model required to maximize the reach of a book. Looking at the book as a product has helped me lock into great ideas and energized my efforts.

2) Write my way through the launch. Just as scientists meticulously record daily findings to ensure that each experiment is replicable and accurate conclusions are drawn, I realized I could write about my experience of publishing a book. Dissecting the process and hoping that my experience may be helpful to others has turned out to be powerful motivator (and a source of content for my blog). When you can zoom out and view your experience in the abstract, you create the necessary distance to be objective about your own performance. In essence, you give yourself a general's panorama of the battlefield rather than the limited view of a foot solider. Vision is essential for innovation.

3) Collaborate — and accept the help of others. Though I've written about the importance of collaboration, I struggle to do it well, and even more so to receive help. The anxiety factor has pushed me to reach out, something I might not have been willing to do previously. I've found fantastic partners who have enriched my efforts with their resources and granted me access to specialized knowledge that will strengthen my "product." Sometimes anxiety can be the tool that forces us past imagined boundaries into a brave new world of possibility.

As I have begun to innovate, to introduce new ideas and ways of doing things, frustration and anxiety have given way to the anticipation of my book selling. In hindsight, it's easy to think that progress is a simple left to right beeline, rather than something approximating a Wild West duel between you, and you. It's also tempting to glorify "push" (the problem to be solved) and "pull" (the exciting new idea) as the forces of progress we laud in entrepreneurs. But sometimes your weaknesses (procrastination and anxiety) may actually be the "red-hot coal stuck in the throat" that summons your superpowers. Or as Bob Moesta writes, "The moment of struggle is the defining act of innovation." So, the next time you want to move your business or you forward, consider the role all four variables play, but then look to the bottom line: put your anxiety to work and innovate.

To think more about the four variables involved in progress, consider reading:

Push
Why I'm Glad Sheryl Sandberg Isn't On Facebook's Board

Pull
The Essence of a Great Presentation

Allegiance to the Past
Battling Entitlement, the Innovation Killer

Anxiety
The Long of Coming Up Short

A popular post on this site, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, provides a fabulous summary of what makes the difference between those who succeed and those who don't. But, in our experience, it misses one really important "thing': Successful people habitually turn obstacles into assets.

People who succeed at work and in life believe and act as if "everything is a gift." Well, maybe not every single thing imaginable. But assuming that everything is a gift is a good way of looking at the problems and surprises you'll encounter in any endeavor, such as, for example, in getting a new venture off the ground, obtaining buy-in with your boss, or launching a new product line in an ultra-competitive market.

Why should you react to a problem with gratitude, whether you are trying to start a business or create anything else? There are a number of reasons.

First, you were going to find out eventually what people did and did not like about your idea. Better to learn it as soon as possible, before you sink more resources into the idea, venture or product line, etc.

Second, the feedback could take you in another direction, or serve as a barrier to your competitors. You thought you wanted to open a restaurant, but a quick survey told you potential customers thought the area was saturated. But more than a few of them said they would love a place that simply had ready-to-go take out to heat up at home.

Third, you got evidence. True, it was not what you were expecting or even wanted, but that still puts you ahead of the person who is just thinking about doing something (like opening a restaurant in your neighborhood.) You know something they don't, and that is an asset. You are ahead of the game.

But what if it's really bad news. It's a disappointment. You were absolutely certain that your boss would approve your idea for a new software program, and she said no in a way that is still echoing down the corridor. No reasonable person can define what you've encountered as anything but a problem, and most people will try to solve the problem. ("Maybe she will like the idea if I go at it this way instead.") That's fine if you can. The problem has gone away and, again, you've learned something that others might not know. (The boss hates Y, but she loves Z.)

But what if you can't solve it? (She hated "Z," too.) Accept the situation to the point of embracing it. Take as a given that it won't ever change, and turn it into an asset. What can you do with the "fact" that it won't ever change? Maybe it presents a heretofore unseen opportunity. Maybe you build it into your product or service in a way that no competitor (having not acted) could imagine. Could you do it on your own? Could you take the idea to a competitor and use it as your calling card to look for the next job? Instead of resisting and lamenting it, treat it as a gift and turn it to your advantage.

For a quick exercise showing that this is easier than you think, take a sheet of paper and divide it into three columns. In the left-hand column, list the obstacles and problems that are keeping you from your goal. Then spend five minutes figuring out as many ways as possible to solve these problems, and list those in the middle column. Show your list of problems and solutions to a friend, and ask them to build on your solutions. When you can't think of anymore solutions, go back to the list of problems in the left-hand column and assume that they can't ever be solved. Now take five minutes with your friend and figure out how those problems could be an asset or an unrecognized opportunity. Put these assets in the right-hand column. Chances are good that, having completed this exercise, you'll turn at least one of your obstacles into an asset.

The thing to remember is this: Successful people work with what they have at hand — whatever comes along — and try to use everything at their disposal in achieving their goals. And that is why they are grateful for surprises, obstacles, and even disappointments. It gives them more information and resources to draw upon.

The football season was looking great for the Green Bay Packers. The 2011 Super Bowl champions finished the regular season with 15 wins and one loss, only to lose in the playoffs last month to this year’s Super Bowl champions the New York Giants.

Many tears were shed in Titletown, but likely not too many among Green Bay’s biggest digital media players. True they would have profited from a Super Bowl bout — Gannett-owned local newspaper Green Bay Press Gazette’s website, GreenBayPressGazette.com, and its micro site PackersNews.com, had 6 million more page views in January 2011 than in the year prior period. But the sheer presence of a major NFL franchise in Green Bay, Wis., has been a big win for digital advertising providers playing in a market of its size.

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In terms of population, the Green Bay-Appleton market is the 69^th largest DMA in the country, according to Nielsen. But in terms of digital spending, it actually ranks at No. 58, fueled by a strong league of Packer-backers, digital ad-embracing recreational businesses, as well as a solid auto dealer market. For the Gannett-owned Press Gazette, digital advertising actually makes up nearly 20% of its overall ad revenue, said Advertising Manager James Maurer.

“Being in a small market with a national football franchise gives us a different flavor,” suggested Dana VanDen Heuvel, president of Green Bay-based digital marketing consultancy Marketing Savant. “We’re obviously smaller, but at the end of the day there’s a little innovation going on and opportunity to experiment.”

The digital advertising market as a whole is above the curve in Green Bay, but some areas are still behind. Most noticeably, spending share in Green Bay towards streaming video ads is 4.6% less compared to the national average (the fact that only two local TV news players dominate the online media market could be a factor, Larry Shaw, VP of research for Borrell Associates, suggested).

Yet Green Bay is excelling in terms of behavioral targeting, with a local share of spending 4.3% higher than the national average. At $9.2 million in 2011, spending is expected to reach $89.4 million in 2016, a significant 868.2% increase.

“The Green Bay market is more focused on local advertisers,” Shaw said. “The smaller business market can afford to do that targeted ad instead of the old method of advertising. A local restaurant doesn’t want to reach as many people as possible, it wants to reach as many people in the area that are likely to go to the restaurant.”

According to comScore, the Press Gazette is the area’s digital media champion, scoring a monthly average of 429,500 unique visitors for the year period ending December 2011.

Only two other media players in the market reach comScore’s minimum reporting threshold of 50,000 unique visitors a month, said comScore marketing manager Carmela Aquino.

Fox affiliate WLUK-TV, owned by LIN Television, is at No. 2 with 355,117 average unique visitors a month to its site Fox11Online.com for the year ending last December. Jay Zollar, WLUK’s VP and GM, gives some credit to the station’s “balanced news” brand, directly inspired by cable news leader Fox News.

Coming in third is WBAY-TV, a local ABC affiliate owned by Young Broadcasting.

WBAY.com received a monthly average of 223,500 unique visitors for the 10-month period ending last December. (Aquino explained that WBAY used a different reporting methodology for December 2010 and January 2011, so numbers for those months are not comparable. In that same 10-month period, the Press Gazette averaged 428,100 unique monthly visitors and WLUK averaged 353,800 unique monthly visitors.)

The Press Gazette’s site-defining Packers coverage welcomed some digital enhancements for the team’s Super Bowl-winning season. During the playoffs, the Packers’ site featured daily live chats with team reporters, and the entire newsroom contributed to blog about Packer-related happenings in town, such as a local elementary school where students and teachers wore green and gold for the day, said Online Editor Julie Riebe.

For the most recent season, the site posted several videos a week of news conferences and locker room interviews, generating several thousand views each. It also ramped up efforts on an ongoing historic photo gallery project; approximately 2,000 to 2,500 Press Gazette archived photos were preserved and showcased on the site last season, with one gallery alone generating 221,000 page views, Riebe said.

The Press Gazette’s mobile sites underwent a Gannett-designed overhaul in February 2011. “Before they weren’t really that attractive,” Riebe said of the old mobile sites. “Now they’re cleaner, and they’ve made it easier to find features like weather and sports scores, and we’re able to add photo galleries to the mobile sites.”

The sites are also customizable; as an example, the Press Gazette put together a University of Wisconsin sports tab exclusive to its mobile sites. Five months later, Gannett modified the Green Bay sites to resemble the Odyssey template it has rolled out for other properties. “It was an effort to make the sites look cleaner to the reader, to present stories in a better format and to give more presence to photo galleries,” Riebe said.

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Street Legal http://streetfightmag.com/?p=15259">0 Comments 20 February 2012 by Brian Dengler “Advertising is content — the only new content that really matters,” wrote AR&D‘s Terry Heaton in a recent blog post responding to a Pew report that questions the financial future of news. His point is salient, for sure, and it renews the question of whether hyperlocals should be incorporating content created by local merchants — perhaps in the form of advertorials or “guest columns.” Publishers like StarNewsOnline are giving it a try. Pulling it off successfully, however, requires hyperlocals to make sure they don’t turn a revenue opportunity into a regulatory nightmare.Heaton suggests that one remedy for local media is to acknowledge that “advertisers are the new content makers, and we need to be exploiting our strengths as experts in the world of content creation in order to serve this burgeoning market.” In a Street Fight column published last year, Patrick Kitano suggested this was just the formula: “Simply put,” Kitano wrote, “business is integral to engaging the community, because they have the commercial incentive to create content that builds their brand equity, directly or indirectly. In the world of social media, the local foodie reporters own restaurants, and the real estate bloggers are realtors; their voices are part of the local media landscape but generally segregated from local news media.”A new research report released by the Content Marketing Institute disclosed that marketers use articles as a leading tactic for B2B marketing. In fact, articles make up 79% of B2B marketing strategies according to the study. Clearly, taking content from merchants is a ripe opportunity for publishers. Patrick Williams, publisher of Worth Magazine, estimated in January 2010 that the magazine’s advertorial program would account for 50 to 60 percent of the magazine’s revenue “in the near future.”However, advertorials and “guest editorials” cannot be passed off as standard editorial content. Two years ago, the FTC issued new guides governing testimonial advertisements, bloggers and celebrity endorsement. The FTC Guides require that a publisher disclose whether content posted on an editorial site or blog was sponsored, paid for, subsidized, or prepared by an advertiser or merchant. For example, the guidelines require:If you run an advertorial for a local business, such as yoga class, you must disclose that the content is a paid advertisement.If you obtain free services or a free sample to write a review for a local shop, you must disclose to the reader that you were provided the sample to write the review.If you are offered a free meal at a local restaurant to write a review, you must disclose the fact in your review.You must disclose if any of your writers or bloggers are sponsored by a particular advertiser or merchant.Your independent writers and bloggers must disclose if they were paid to provide an article or review.The consequences for lack of transparency can be severe. Read the rest of this article here:  http://streetfightmag.com/2012/02/20/the-legal-implications-of-advertiser-supplied-content/

Brian Dengler is an attorney with Vorys Legal Counsel and journalist who covers legal issues in eMedia. He is a former vice-president of AOL, Inc., a former newspaperman, and an EMMY-winning TV journalist. He teaches new media issues as an adjunct at Kent State University and formerly at Otterbein University.via streetfightmag.com

Demand claims trio of departures to be “just coincidence”.

Via Reuse This Bag. (H/T @ritubpant)

Eat green.

For decades, salespeople have practiced something called an "elevator pitch." The idea was that they had to sell themselves and their product or service in the time it took to ride an elevator from the ground to the top floor. Every good salesperson had an "elevator pitch" and could perform it flawlessly at a moment's notice.

Today, elevators are much faster and attention spans are much shorter, so you've got to amp up your pitch. You've got to have a 118.

The 118 Pitch is my modern term for the old elevator pitch. It's based on the fact that 118 seconds is the length of the average elevator ride in New York City. The first 8 seconds are "the hook"—the time you have to get the "lean in" factor, to snag your prospect, to catch their interest.

Those first 8 seconds are the key. In researching the idea I discovered that the length of time the average human can concentrate on something and not lose some focus is as little as 8 seconds. Eight! (It's true--I found it on the Internet!) Thirty seconds, then, was way too long for getting that lean-in factor for your pitch. You know how you hear something in a conversation and you lean in because you want to hear the rest of it? That's what you want from your prospect in those first 8 seconds of the 118.

If you accomplish that in those 8 seconds, they'll give you the next 110 seconds to drive your message home with no bull. It's not about name dropping. It's about what's in it for the recipient of your pitch.

Your 118 must:

•Grab the attention of your prospect
•Convey who you are
•Describe what your business offers
•Explain the promises you will deliver on

You need speed and immediate relevance. A compelling, attention-grabbing 118 tells who you are, the value of what you do and sells that to anyone, internally and externally. Used correctly, it helps your business grow bigger. Your 118 should also describe the thing that separates you from everyone else that sells the same thing. I don't care what businesses you are in or what other services you offer; tell me how you are different, your story and how that story connects to your prospect.

Leaders need to get away from bland pronouncements that say, "We do this" and focus on "what we do for you." You're supposed to understand not just what you're selling, but what it offers to your prospect.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of 118 Pitches:

The Good: Mentions your product or service and tells how it will help your prospect. "In less than two minutes, I will tell you how the use of me, my company, or my service will grow your development department 115%."

The Bad: Mentions what you're offering, but lacks any reference to what it offers your prospect. "My name is Sam Maybe-Somebody, and my company The Hopeful-Who Knows wants to work with your company using our We Think Super Service."

The Ugly: Makes no mention of your company or service and how the prospect will benefit. "My name is Sam Nobody, and my company wants to work with your company because we think we can help you."

Eight seconds goes by in a heartbeat and you don't have time for anything that's flabby or ambivalent. Cut to the chase, make them lean in, and then don't let go.

Start your 118 with a rough draft. Then, do another draft. Then, put it down for a while and come back to it. Does it still ring true? Repeat the process. When you finally arrive at a 118 that best suits your business, you'll know it. The vibe will be there. It'll feel good rolling off your tongue. You'll wake up in the morning reciting it and go to bed at night doing the same thing.

You'll believe it.

After all, if you don't, nobody else will.

118 seconds seems like the perfect length for a video!

Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success.

The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply them to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life. Though Christensen’s thinking comes from his deep religious faith, we believe that these are strategies anyone can use. And so we asked him to share them with the readers of HBR. To learn more about Christensen’s work, visit his HBR Author Page.

Before I published The Innovator’s Dilemma, I got a call from Andrew Grove, then the chairman of Intel. He had read one of my early papers about disruptive technology, and he asked if I could talk to his direct reports and explain my research and what it implied for Intel. Excited, I flew to Silicon Valley and showed up at the appointed time, only to have Grove say, “Look, stuff has happened. We have only 10 minutes for you. Tell us what your model of disruption means for Intel.” I said that I couldn’t—that I needed a full 30 minutes to explain the model, because only with it as context would any comments about Intel make sense. Ten minutes into my explanation, Grove interrupted: “Look, I’ve got your model. Just tell us what it means for Intel.”

I insisted that I needed 10 more minutes to describe how the process of disruption had worked its way through a very different industry, steel, so that he and his team could understand how disruption worked. I told the story of how Nucor and other steel minimills had begun by attacking the lowest end of the market—steel reinforcing bars, or rebar—and later moved up toward the high end, undercutting the traditional steel mills.

When I finished the minimill story, Grove said, “OK, I get it. What it means for Intel is...,” and then went on to articulate what would become the company’s strategy for going to the bottom of the market to launch the Celeron processor.

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.

My class at HBS is structured to help my students understand what good management theory is and how it is built. To that backbone I attach different models or theories that help students think about the various dimensions of a general manager’s job in stimulating innovation and growth. In each session we look at one company through the lenses of those theories—using them to explain how the company got into its situation and to examine what managerial actions will yield the needed results.

On the last day of class, I ask my students to turn those theoretical lenses on themselves, to find cogent answers to three questions: First, how can I be sure that I’ll be happy in my career? Second, how can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse and my family become an enduring source of happiness? Third, how can I be sure I’ll stay out of jail? Though the last question sounds lighthearted, it’s not. Two of the 32 people in my Rhodes scholar class spent time in jail. Jeff Skilling of Enron fame was a classmate of mine at HBS. These were good guys—but something in their lives sent them off in the wrong direction.

The Class of 2010

As the students discuss the answers to these questions, I open my own life to them as a case study of sorts, to illustrate how they can use the theories from our course to guide their life decisions.

If you like this I'd also reccomend reading: Mastering the Art of Living Well - http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/12/mastering_the_art_of_living_me.html