This weekend, I visited my parents in Vegas. While my daughter was entertained by Grandma and Grandpa, I settled in to a routine that I’d long forgotten—I read an actual hard copy of the Wall Street Journal. With newsprint dotting my fingers, I read cover to cover.

I usually get my news online and it just isn’t the same. When I got to the Opinion section and this article by Bill Wyman, “What Newspapers Can Learn From Craigslist,” I couldn’t help but think there was some cosmic alignment at this particular moment.

Wyman opines that newspapers need to put readers first and get rid of the unwanted navigation elements, like multiple links to different sections of the site. Instead, newspapers should take a page from Craigslist, which has been criticized for its simplicity. Craigslist gives users exactly what they want and puts very little on the site that isn’t useful to them.

I think Wyman’s right. It’s high-time newspapers think about online readers and what we want. I’d be thrilled to get to the editorial without the other garbage crowding my screen.

All marketers could really do a better job of this. Sometimes, we’re too caught up on what we want to put on the page, rather than what the user wants or needs from it.

Maybe I’m wrong. Could newspapers be making the online experience so miserable that we‘re driven to pick up a hard copy? After all, I flipped through my parents’ copy of the WSJ over a cup of Verona this weekend, and today I’m a returned subscriber.

Of course we never read those forwards, but I recently opened one that I found profound, albeit somewhat simple. It said:

There comes a point in your life when you realize:
Who matters,
Who never did,
Who won’t anymore…
And who always will.
So, don’t worry about people from your past,
There’s a reason why they didn’t make it to your future.

Good advice. We need to focus on what’s important, both personally and professionally, right now and in the future. If we keep trying to please people and serve customers who may never matter, we won’t have time or energy left to take care of those who matter most.

What are you doing to better focus on people that will make it to your future? Do you find that you spend more time pleasing your problem customers, or are you nurturing and supporting your best ones?

With the biggest sporting, and advertising, event of the year upon us, now is the time when viewers tune into commercials, especially when there are celebrity spokespeople backing the advertised brands.

But, there is one familiar face that won’t be present, at least for the commercials, during the big game. Although Peyton Manning will be starting for the Colts on Sunday, he won’t be spotted during commercial breaks as he frequently has been in the past. It’s not because he’s no longer one of the biggest names in football and advertising (he is still one of the most used spokespeople in ads), but because the brands he endorses, like MasterCard, Sony, DirecTV, Gatorade and Sprint, have all pulled their Super Bowl advertising spots.

Does this mean that times are changing for advertising? Are big-name advertisers no longer willing to fork over millions of dollars to run a 30-second spot during the game? Has the explosion of social media caused companies to rethink budgets and reinvest money that was traditionally directed toward advertising to other areas?

Maybe paying big bucks for ads isn’t the way to go anymore. It’s time that marketers strategize and rethink to ensure that marketing dollars are being spent wisely, getting the most bang for the buck and reaching customers.

So, what do you think? Have you seen companies redirecting advertising dollars to other areas? Are you going to miss seeing Peyton in commercials? I know I’ll miss seeing him, but I’ll still be cheering for the Colts during game time!

photo courtesy: www.flickr.com/photos/Leyinglo

If there’s one thing that 2010 holds for PR people both B2B and B2C, it’s the opportunity to exercise our latent writing muscles. Our organizations need blog content, podcast and viral video scripts and other forms of self-published digital media content in addition to the time-honored press releases, white papers and press kits.

It’s more important than ever to understand how online audiences communicate about our organizations. This is a cornerstone of SEO. And today, SEO walks hand-in-hand with content development.

More and more, we’re going to see the restructuring of PR departments to house content development. This means PR pros need to understand and use the keywords that have been identified for their organizations’ SEO program. And if the organization doesn’t have an SEO program (yes, this still happens), then PR needs to be ready to lead the charge on this front.

In my mind, there are no better people to deliver clear, concise, “on message” and keyed-in content than PR people. What do you think? Is this where PR is going?

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