Aaron Hoos

Leno/O’Brien. It has dominated the news for a couple weeks now and I confess that, even though I’m more of a Letterman-viewer myself (on the odd occasion when I watch TV), I’ve been drawn to the debate and have even tuned in to see Leno or O’Brien and to watch how they are dealing with (and joking about) the situation.

Today, Conan O’Brien cashes out of NBC with a $45 million dollar deal-breaking payout. Leno moves back to “his” spot. And now there’s a big gaping “Leno hole” at 10.

For a brief period, ratings will spike as people watch to see what happens (I’m tuning in and I barely care). Then ratings will decline, probably close to the levels where Jay left them when he moved to his primetime spot. Maybe slightly lower.

For some, it will be business as usual:

• Letterman will make some wiseass comments to get a laugh but then continue chugging along. There’s no win (he won’t gain more viewers from this) but no loss, either.
• The advertisers will get a slight spike in attention for the few weeks that we’re all tuning in but then it will go back to business as usual for them. Meh.

And some come out as clear losers:

• Conan gets $45 million but will be remembered as the guy who got ousted from the Tonight Show for tanked ratings (whether or not those were his fault). Actually, since it’s been reported that he shared some of his money out of his own pocket with his staff, he might actually be positioned as benevolent in spite of the circumstances.
• Leno gets his old job back but will be perceived as petty and vindictive (even if it wasn’t him that initiated the change and he’s doing his best to make it appear that way).

In both cases, this will appear as a “you might remember” factor on every write-up about them in the future.

And, although I’m not in show business, I am in business and work with people all the time on improving communications or using content to solve situations. I would make these recommendations to Jay Leno: Have Conan on your show one day. Soon. Keep it light and fun, make fun of NBC, get seen together smiling. It will be good for BOTH parties. Or, they need to both go to Haiti at the same time and work together. I’m not kidding. That will kill any future story of animosity (and help the people of Haiti while also refocusing the spotlight where it should be).

But NBC is screwed

There is no way that NBC can come out of this unscathed. They’ll make some money on the advertising spike, but that’s about it. They’ll seem foolish for initiating the whole debacle by moving Leno from a place where he was very good to primetime timeslot. They’ll seem like they are jumping the gun a little for reacting to Leno’s and O’Brien’s ratings only 4 months into the shows. They’ll seem cold-hearted for removing O’Brien. And they’ll seem like they don’t know what they are doing by putting Leno back to where he shone. And, they’ll seem foolish for spending millions and millions of dollars to pay off Conan O’Brien and to fill what I’ve dubbed “The Leno hole” — that primetime spot that will now be filled by Law & Order re-runs. Oh, and when Conan gets a new job, NBC will be the butt of nearly every joke (in the same way that GE is for Letterman).

Ultimately, it is going to cost them. A lot. Bad PR, millions in “fix-it” money, and an erosion of viewership. They are almost exactly where they were several months ago, just $45 million lighter (and potentially way more than that if they decide to spend good money on filling the 10pm Leno hole).

This is a classic case of corporate blundering in an attempt to fix a previous error. And they are either going to try to spin it (bad idea) or ride it out without saying anything and hope for the best (a slightly less bad idea).

UPDATE: I just found an article that gives some support to some of the dollar figures I referenced in my blog: $45 million paid to Conan and over $300 million expected to be spent on new shows to fill “the Leno hole”.

Wired is one of those magazines that I always mean to read but never seem to get around to. Not sure why — other stuff always seems to be slightly more pressing, I suppose.

A friend put me onto an article by Wired’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson (who you might remember as the author of The Long Tail, which is essential reading in my opinion). This guy’s smart. Listen to what he has to say.

The article, “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business“, talks about why giving stuff away for free is good for business. And it’s not referring to the calender you get from your local real estate agent each year.

The article opens with Gillette’s impact on the marketplace (he gave away razor handles and made a fortune on disposable blades). We’ve seen a similar phenomenon with computer printers that are nearly free while the ink cartridges cost a fortune.

The last half of the article outlines a taxonomy of 6 categories of free offers. The article is long-ish, but you need to read this part. It’s gold. Read it and think about how a free offer might impact your business. You might be surprised.

(On a side-note, my favorite line comes from off-beat genius Stewart Brand in 1984: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive … That tension will not go away.“… Brilliant!).

This is interesting, particularly because of an article in The Guardian in which the Financial Times editor said that “almost all” news sites will charge for content within the year. It might happen as a desperate move by some but as long as we have citizen journalists, Twitter, and a competitive environment where content is offered free as a way to attract eyeballs, we’ll have free content. The only way that the media can charge for their content is if they can prove that they deliver more insight (or some other kind of value) than bloggers/tweeters/free news sites. The Economist does this well right now, and so does Harvard Business Review. But there aren’t a lot of others, I think.

To bring this back to the Business Diamond Framework: Traditional Newsmedia isn’t delivering enough on the Value-Add Diamond to be able to sell anything on the To-Market Diamond; and their Support Diamond is so bloated that their costs are way too high.

“Content is king”. That is a rule of thumb adopted by website creators because they know that high quality content helps to attract and retain customers by positioning the company and by building relationships with people.

Seth Godin, in his excellent free ebook Everyone is an Expert, says that people aren’t searching for anything online… they’re going online to make sense (page 9). That’s a brilliant distinction and it supports the belief that content is king. We need content to help us make sense.

It used to be that content would get piled on top of content on the first page. Website owners wanted links to many things on their first page to help position the company as the expert. They wanted people to click to their home page and see that there were many options to choose from.

But lately, things are changing. Businesses still know that content is king — that people will still go to their site to find trustworthy information to help them make sense. But those businesses are beginning to realize that overwhelming people with links on the first page is not the way to greet prospects and customers.An excellent example to show this difference can be found by comparing the websites of software giants Oracle and SAP.

Here is a screenshot of Oracle‘s home page.

It’s not easy to tell from here but there are 72 “primary” links on this page (“primary” meaning highlighted in the main body of the page, not the smaller ones in the the header or footer). 72! That is a lot for any web visitor to read through even if they are sorted the way Oracle has them.

Here is SAP‘s home page.

Again, it’s hard to tell at this size but there are 10 primary links (with only 5 ever showing at a time).

What a difference! Oracle’s page has an overwhelming number of links that could turn off any prospect or customer. SAP, on the other hand, has a simple, clean site with only a few links.

In my mind, SAP has made a huge change. My advice to Oracle? Better fix your site quickly!

It is so important to guide your visitors rather than to simply present them with all of their options at the beginning. The whole web 2.0 environment has a clean look with much fewer links. Just click to web 2.0 companies like Skype, Facebook, Box.net, Flickr, and LinkedIn to see how these companies are using a minimal amount of links to greet customers.

The point of this blog is not to simply suggest that your homepage should have fewer links. Rather, it’s to illustrate much more important concepts:

• People want to be guided. They think they want all of the options but they really don’t. They want a way to get to the right options quickly. The thinking used to be that businesses give all the options up-front to reduce clicking through a long content pathway from one page to the next. But people would rather click for quick sorting and clear, “bite-sized” content. It creates longer content pathways (by requiring more pages on a site) but it makes choosing easier because each click narrows the choices they have to make.
• Content is only king if it is useful. If content is presented en masse, it requires effort and it can be difficult to place that content within a context. Content becomes more useful when it is presented in manageable pieces within a context. And that context is created with high-level choices presented to the website visitor right on the homepage.

As you can probably tell from Monday’s blog post, this was a busy week. Actually, it was a record-setting week in a record-setting quarter. It killed me not to blog as much as I normally do but I had to focus on clients or else they’d gather in a mob with pitchforks and torches and break down my door. (But I love each and every one of them).

Anyway, while I was working and NOT blogging, I did stumble across a number of absolutely brilliant ideas — organizations, websites, and concepts. I bookmarked them throughout the week and am delivering them all here to atone for my quiet blog.

Idea #1: Collaboration tool

I’m big on collaboration: I use GoogleDocs, MindMeister, Zoho, and other sites for immediate collaboration. But I’m also a visual thinker and you’ll notice that I may be a writer but I usually map something out before I turn it into words. And that’s where the first great idea comes from: ImaginationCubed. This site is from GE and it’s a free drawing tool you can share with others. I’m sure there are similar services from others but I liked this one for its clean, simple look and intuitive interface.

Idea #2: Storage rental

You may remember me writing about iStopOver, a site that helps to match businesses with spare office space and travelling business people who need the space. Great idea, great value proposition for buyers and sellers. Well, I did a bit of work for a new client this week who is based out of Australia. His site is StoreroomRental.com and his business proposition is similar: Homeowners and businesses have lots of extra space (spare rooms, closets, sheds, garages). StoreroomRentals helps to match people who want to rent out that extra space with people who need the space, want convenient proximity, and don’t want to rent a large space from a commercial storage facility. It’s a great idea and turns all that extra room that we all have in our homes and offices into revenue-generating space. I’m excited to think about the possiblities in front of his business!

Idea #3: Water for the world

I like to think about business but I’m not all about business. There are people in the world that need our help. I’m usually a “teach them to fish” kind of guy. Today, I stumbled by total accident across this site: Hipporoller.org. They point out that many people in third world countries go to the local watersource and use dirty, heavy containers (even gas cans!) to lug water back home. They can’t bring much (have you ever tried to move jugs of water cross country?) and they’re not carrying it in a safe manner. Hipporoller has build sturdy round water containers that carry a lot of water, they roll across the ground, and they bring more water back home in a clean, safe container. That is huge.

Idea #4: Another collaboration tool

I like Google. They have consistently changed the web in several ways. This latest collaboration tool, I believe could be a game changer. It’s called Google Wave. If you think about the benefits of collaborating in GoogleDocs and the interactive communication in Facebook and the feel of real time conversation snippets in DMs on Twitter, this builds on those. Here is a video. It’s long; I don’t expect you to watch it all, but watch some of it. It seems like it will be a go-to collaboration environment for me and I love that they will come out of the gate with many apps ready-to-go.

Newspapers are struggling. Magazines are wondering “what’s next?” I wouldn’t say that paper-based communication is dead but I would say that it’s in the hospital and doctors are calling up the specialists.

Chris Brogan, a business/tech/social media consultant (okay, that description falls short of what he actually does) had some insightful things to say about print publications and opportunities for their survival. He delivers meaningful specifics that show how information delivered by the “ideal” next media company intersects with the needs of the audience.

Read his post here: The Next Media Company.