… And effective too, evidently, as numerous elected officials have scooted away from the legislation (including some who were once co-sponsors of the legislation.)

Among the more interesting commentary I’ve read from concerned citizens on this topic is a note I received from Wolfgang Nebmaier, an industry colleague who provides business translation services for corporations.

He has is an interesting perspective, I think, considering his background and business activities. Here are some excerpts from what he wrote me:

I am of German descent. This makes the issue of censorship very personal to me. During all times of state terrorism, free speech was not free. Instead, [an elaborate] spy system is established, as was the case with Hitler, and later Stalin, and later … anywhere.

Another tidbit: I am a translator and, as such, occasionally canvas job sites. Recently when I looked for translation jobs, there were just a few – except for a plethora of national security-related language analysis jobs. These are Blackwater-type, non-governmental government proxies hired to monitor whatever they are told to monitor – ‘just doing their job.’ The infrastructure of Big Brother watching every click we make is in place, my friend … way in place!

Regardless of what side you take in the SOPA/PIPA debate, the concerns raised by Wolfgang are well worth considering. They’re definitely food for thought for the 21st Century.

Now comes along a report from 24/7 Wall St, an equity investment data aggregator and investment firm, which has compiled a list of the “Ten Most Hated” companies in America.

Its list is based on reviewing a variety of qualitative and quantitative attributes. Companies were examined based on total return to shareholders in comparison to the broader market plus competitors in the same sectors.

Financial analyst opinions on publicly held companies were also reviewed, as well as findings from consumer surveys conducted by diverse sources (the University of Michigan’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, Consumer Reports, J.D. Power & Associates, ForeSee, etc.)

Also evaluated was the Flame Index, which uses an algorithm to review ~12,000 websites to rank companies based on the frequency of negative words and terms associated with them.

Lastly, an analysis of media coverage to determine the extent of negative and positive news coverage was conducted.

Stripping away such quasi-governmental agencies as the U.S. Post Office, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, it leaves us with an interesting list of the “worst of the worst.”

Some of the companies that made the 24/7 Wall St list – and the reasons for them achieving the dubious honor – include:

American Airlines – Not only has this airline filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, it’s rated the worst airline for customer service. It’s performing at or near the bottom of the heap on attributes like on-time departures, flight cancellations, and baggage handling problems. American Airlines’ University of Michigan ACS index of 63 is dramatically lower than Southwest – the industry’s leader which scored an 81 on the index.

Facebook – This behemoth may claim a user base of 800 million+, but that doesn’t stop people from having major grievances with the company. A recent customer satisfaction survey conducted by IBOPE Zogby found that ~30% of users consider Facebook’s customer service to be “poor.” (Anyone who has ever actually tried to interface with the company might be tempted to ask, “What customer service?” Facebook has also received negative press coverage for sneakily instituting, with no warning, privacy settings that change how it shares personal information with others.

Best Buy – This company is still smarting over self-inflicted problems during the holiday season when it ran out of popular merchandise it sold online … then neglected to inform buyers of the fact until just two days before Christmas. The retailer’s explanations (excuses?) seemed lame. It’s one reason ForeSee dropped Best Buy from being the second-ranked company for retail satisfaction prior to the holiday season (just behind Amazon). Now Best Buy is ranked so poorly, it no longer appears among the Top 20 national retailers. To make matters worse, Forbes magazine predicts that Best Buy is a prime candidate for simply disappearing … the only question is whether it will happen before or after Sears/Kmart bites the dust.

Netflix – Here’s a company that’s gone from the “highest of the high” to the “lowest of the low” in one fell swoop. Instituting dramatically higher pricing in August 2011 resulted in the rapid loss of more than 800,000 Netflix subscribers … accompanied by the company’s stock price plummeting 30% from over $300 per share to $215 in under six months (and more than 60% for the full year).

Johnson & Johnson – When an iconic brand like J&J can manage to have a slew of two dozen product recalls over a two-year period – including with Motrin and Children’s Tylenol – it’s bound to have a dramatic impact on company performance and reputation. The FDA took over three Tylenol plants in March 2011, and OTC drug sales are off double digits compared to the previous year. While J&J’s stock price hasn’t tanked in the event, it has remained flat – which is horrendous performance compared to the rest of the pharma industry.

For the record, the five other companies named to 24/7 Wall St.’s “Ten Worst” list were:

 AT&T
 Bank of America
 Goldman Sachs
 Nokia
 Sears

… And I’m sure all of us can think of reasons why these also gained entry onto the “rogue’s gallery” of corporations.

In fact, more than half of American employers surveyed by Manpower Group, a leading staffing group, report that they’re having trouble hiring qualified workers. That’s nearly 40% higher than what was reported in the company’s 2010 survey.

The most obvious reason for the incongruity is the disconnect between the background and capabilities of available workers and the skill sets companies are seeking.

But there may be a few other factors at work as well. Spokespersons for Manpower Group suspect the following:

 The 2009 recession made it very easy for companies to find qualified candidates … but those days are now over.

 Employers may be less willing to hire candidates from outside their area so as to avoid incurring relocation expenses … even as job candidates may also be less willing to consider moving because of the soft housing market.

Melanie Holmes, a Manpower vice president, puts it this way: “Employers are getting pickier and pickier. We want the perfect person to walk through the door.” She and other specialists contend that companies need to get more realistic about the situation and react accordingly.

The Manpower survey results were part of a large global research study of ~40,000 employers worldwide. The trends it sees of greater difficulties in hiring were clearly evident in several other countries, besides just the U.S. (India, U.K. and Germany), whereas in China the trend was just the opposite.

More results from the 2011 Manpower Group survey can be found here.

One question I hear often from business leaders is to what degree of confidence should they place in these automated programs to actually deliver what is promised. There’s a nagging concern that some of the promises might be a bit more like “blue smoke and mirrors.”

As it turns out, some of that concern may be well-placed. Here’s one recent example of problems along these lines. And Trust Metrics, an online media rating firm, has studied more than 500,000 unique web domains – in effect, “taking inventory of the ad inventory.” And what it’s found is pretty sobering.

For starters, the online ad inventory supply is marked by dynamic change and constant evolution. Approximately 20% of the domains studied by Trust Metrics in late 2010 don’t even exist anymore as of the end of 2011. Tens of thousands of sites that may have once been vetted by agencies or networks are gone. There is no content at these domains … or they’re simply “ad farms.”

Trust Metrics claims that never have so many marketers purchased so much online ad inventory in an environment that is so degraded, a significant portion of the domains might not even be around a few months from now.

Moreover, approximately 10% of the domains Trust Metric evaluated that sell ad impressions in scaled buying environments (e.g., exchanges and networks) are actually non-English language sites – hardly valuable places to advertise. Plus, that represents more domain names than those identified as pornographic, or containing significant profanity or hate speech.

Trust Metrics’ evaluation also found that well over half of the sites available in large ad networks are what it classifies as “substandard environments which don’t adhere to even the barest minimum in publishing or editorial principles.

The bottom line on this is that of for 1 million domains that sell ads … most advertisers wouldn’t want to be on ~600,00 of them!

Of course, the flip side of this is that there are thousands of sites that do perform for advertisers – and those “good” sites drive valuable clickthroughs, sales and brand building.

But clearly, advertisers would be well advised to adopt a “buyer beware” stance in the current online advertising environment.

Whether it’s the alarm clock, the coffee pot, clothing, appliances, the car and the gasoline it takes to run it, everything with which this person interfaces during the course of the day comes from overseas – especially China or some other East Asian country.

For those of you who haven’t encountered this satirical little piece yet, you can read it here.

Dana Bales, an industry colleague of mine who is a managing partner at Dayton, OH-based NEO Marketing Communications, reacted to this joke by noting a few key points about China. He writes:

I’m a free trade advocate. I absolutely support NAFTA. But for the life of me, I don’t get our trade relationship with China. Let me get this straight:

 China uses American dollars to subsidize its own industries.

Food for thought, indeed – even if you don’t agree with every single one of Bales’ statements.

It would be nice, too, if our government and trade officials could focus on coming up with some workable solutions to these issues. I think we’d all be happier if we could relegate this sort of gallows humor to the literary trash can!

The B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends study is a joint research effort of the Content Marketing Institute and marketing information resources firm MarketingProfs. The survey found that nine out of ten B-to-B marketers are using some form of content marketing activities to achieve their business goals.

[For this survey, content marketing (also known as custom publishing or branded content) is defined as “the creation and distribution of educational and/or compelling content in multiple formats to attract and/or retain customers.”]

The research found that usage of several content tactics is now quite widespread:

 News articles: ~79% of respondents are using
 Social media (excluding blogs): ~74%
 Blogs: ~65%
 e-Newsletters: ~63%
 Case studies: ~58%
 In-person events: ~56%
 Videos: ~52%
 White papers: ~51%
 Webinars or webcasts: ~46%

When queried as to how effective marketers believe these tactics to be, a combination of traditional and “new” ones were cited with high effectiveness scores:

 In-person events: ~78% view as an “effective” tactic
 Case studies: ~70
 Webinars or webcasts: ~70%
 e-Newsletters: ~60%
 White papers: ~60%
 Blogs: ~58%
 Web microsites: ~56%
 Articles: ~51%
 Social media: ~51%
 Videos: ~51%

The survey also investigated how content tactics are being measured for success. Tracking web traffic stats is the most popular measurement tool:

 Web traffic: ~58% use to measure success
 Sales lead quality: ~49% use
 Direct sales figures: ~41% use
 Sales lead quantity: ~41% use
 Qualitative feedback from customers: ~40% use
 Search engine rankings: ~40% use
 Inbound weblinks: ~30% use

And what is the biggest challenge these marketers see in content creation? It’s the age-old problem of coming up with interesting topics to write about.

More than four in ten respondents cited “producing the kind of content that engages prospects and customers” as their biggest challenge.

Some of the comments heard from survey respondents on this topic sound all-too-familiar:

 “Finding people within my organization to contribute their expertise … nobody outside of marketing seems to see the value in sharing our expertise with the market via content.”

 “Management patience: Management needs to understand that in today’s B-to-B environment, it takes time to engage prospects.”

What about your situation? Are your content management issues the same ones as reported in this study … or are you facing different challenges?

For those of us in the business world, it comes as no surprise that conventions and trade shows are in significant decline. While they’re not exactly on life support, we’ve witnessed convention attendance drop pretty significantly over the past decade.

In fact, the decline in the United States has been more than 30% — from 125 million attendees in 2000 to just 86 million in 2010.

It’s not hard to understand why. The “shocks and hard knocks” of the economy have contributed, of course. But in addition to this, the ways people communicate have been changed forever by the online/interactive revolution.

With lean staffing — who has time anymore to take four days away from the office? – plus the ability to congregate easily in online in virtual forums and meetings, the need for face-to-face interaction just isn’t the same as it once was.

With such a steep decline in trade show attendance, one wouldn’t expect that investment in new or updated convention centers would be high on the agenda, correct?

Think again. Even as cities and their convention centers are competing for a shrinking pool of convention-goers, they’ve continued on an expansion binge – paid for by hapless taxpayers.

You don’t have to look hard to see example of example of initiatives that make essentially no economic sense, being undertaken by cities in a form of one-upsmanship that is reminiscent of that famous Irving Berlin song, “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

At McCormick Place in Chicago – the convention venue everyone loves to hate – the city has invested heavily in expansions and upgrades in recent years. In 2007, a new $900 million expansion was completed … and today McCormick Center is running at 55% capacity. Swell, fellas.

Closer to where I live, Baltimore City built a brand new, city-owned hotel to the tune of $300 million, thinking it would improve the sagging fortunes of its convention center. Opened in 2008, the hotel has managed to lose money in every successive year – as much as ~$11 million in 2010.

So what is Baltimore’s reaction? It’s now considering putting together a new public-private initiative that will add an arena, yet another convention hotel, plus an additional ~400,000 of convention space. The cost in public money? “Only” about $400 million.

From Boston to Austin and from Columbus to Phoenix, public officials dupe themselves into believing that if only they upgrade or expand their convention facilities, they’ll see robust growth that meets or exceeds optimistic projections of increased hotel booking and other ancillary economic activity.

Time and again, they’re wrong. And not just because of the economy or changing business practices. When every other city is expanding right along with you, no one is going to attract more than their fair share of any additional business potential that may be out there.

I love what Jeff Jacoby, an op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe, had to say about the newest efforts to expand Boston’s convention center (along with a ~$200 million price tag in new public subsidies), even after a less-than-stellar 2004 improvement initiative fell woefully short of the predicted new convention activity.

“The whole thing is a racket,” Jacoby stated. “Once again, the politicos will expand their empire. Once again, crony capitalism will enrich a handful of wired business operators. And once again, ‘Joe and Jane Taxpayer’ will pay through the nose. How many times must we see this movie before we finally shut it off?”

How many times, indeed?

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics in survey results released earlier this summer, more Americans are using their weekends to get more done on the job. The results came from a survey that involved interviews with ~13,200 people over the age of 15.

Non-self-employed persons in office or administrative positions are less likely to be working on weekends. Only 20% of those folks report doing weekend work, compared to ~82% of them working on weekdays either full- or part-time.

But on a typical working day, nearly one in four employed Americans reported that they do at least some of their work at home. Not surprisingly, self-employed people are likely to do so, but those working in business management are more likely to do so as well.

The BLS reports that employed men spend, on average, 8 hours and 9 minutes per day on work or work-related activities. That’s a bit more time than employed women spend on work-related activities (their daily average was 7 hours and 26 minutes).

However, the trajectory appears to be upward for women and downward for men … so it may not be long before any difference between the genders completely disappears.

And for those people who work more than one job … that’s where weekends have lost most of their meaning as a time for R&R, because fully half of the people with multiple jobs find themselves working weekends.

As things evolve, it’s becoming pretty clear that the “Protestant Work Ethic” for which our society is so well known remains pretty robust, 200+ years on.

It reminds me of how a teacher of Russian History explained things to us students in class at Vanderbilt University back in my college years. Speaking of Southern Europe, this professor claimed, “People work to live” … whereas in Northern Europe, “They live to work.”

For some folks, as their working years grind on, they might be thinking that the whole enterprise has become a little sucky. But hopefully, most of us are performing tasks we like or love, so that it doesn’t seem quite so much like “work” … or apply whatever other coping mechanism does the trick!

The latest evidence of this comes in statistics released by Mediafinder®, a magazine tracking service run by Oxbridge Communications. It turns out that in 2011, there were 239 print publications launched in the United States and Canada. That’s a 24% increase over 2010, when 193 magazines were launched.

And at the other end of the scale, the number of magazines that ceased publishing in 2011 decreased over the previous year: 152 versus 176.

Actually, new magazine startups as well as closings are down significantly from just a few years ago. The worst year was in 2009, when a whopping 596 print magazines closed (but also 275 were launched).

Reviewing the stats, it’s not hard to understand the dynamics as to why print magazines have been on the ropes. For starters, magazine newsstand sales have dropped by nearly 50% over the past decade. And ad pages in consumer magazines fell more than 30% just between 2006 and 2010.

And in 2011 year-to-date, ad pages are continuing to track a smidgen lower (-1%), but at least the trend is now nearly flat rather than steeply downward.

To be sure, magazines have tried different tactics to stem the slide. One of the more interesting moves has been by the publishing firm Meredith Corporation, which announced a plan in the summer to begin guaranteeing that advertisers’ magazine buys will yield an increase in sales for their products or services.

Dubbed the “Meredith Engagement Dividend,” the program represents a new level of accountability for “analogue” media, which long relied on fuzzier metrics like audience reach and before/after market research.

The publisher’s new program is available to advertisers who commit to a minimum level of advertising impressions annually across multiple Meredith magazine titles. It works by correlating Meredith’s magazine readers with Nielsen’s Homescan (National Consumer Panel) service. That’s the same marketing research resource many top consumer products firms use to measure their product sales.

The Nielsen/NCP database of ~85 million consumer magazine readers is used to correlate the effect magazine ads have on resulting product purchase behaviors.

Meredith claims the research shows that advertisers in four key categories – household goods, beauty products, OTC drugs and food – have increased their product sales an average of 10% via ads placed in the Meredith publications. That claim is based on measuring the sales impact of “higher frequency” ad campaigns that ran during 2009 and 2010.

It’ll be interesting to see how the performance of print magazines evolves over the next few years. For now, the steep slide appears to have ended, but there’s no real evidence of a turnaround. The question is whether publishers can adjust their operating models to continue to work within the new, lower level of business activity.

Maybe they’ll succeed. You know … hope and change and all that.

Gift cards are forecast to be bigger than ever in holiday season 2011.

And why not? Online shopping so convenient and cost-effective.

Shopping online gives people the flexibility to shop from wherever they are, without having to spend money on transportation. They can shop at all hours of the day or night. Merchandise price comparisons between sites are easy to do. And in many cases, consumers won’t have to pay any sales taxes or shipping charges.

Tack on free gift notes and even free gift-wrapping at many sites, and you have to wonder why anyone would bother to shop for gifts any other way.

In an environment where shopping has become so easy, convenient and cost-effective – and with basically endless merchandise choices – you might figure that holiday shoppers would be finding and buying “just the right gift” for family members or friends.

And so what’s “just the right gift”? Gift cards – to the tune of $28 billion, according to the National Retail Federation’s Holiday Consumer Intentions & Actions Survey, which queried more than 8,500 consumers in early November.

It’s not just that gift cards are the easiest possible gift to buy, with basicaly zero thought going into the purchase. It turns out they’re also the most requested holiday gift on people’s wish lists. (Prior NRF surveys going back five years have found that to be the case, too.)

The 2011 holiday intentions survey found that gift cards are on track to eclipse last year’s performance:

 More people plan to purchase gift cards this season (~80% versus ~77% in 2010)

 The average gift card amount will be higher (~$43 vs. ~$41)

The average total spend on all gift cards is predicted to be ~$155 per purchaser. The survey also found that men tend to spend more on gift cards than women.

Speaking for myself, I’m not at all surprised by that last finding. I think I fit the profile pretty well: After “one too many” gift returns made by my wife and daughters, I resorted to gift cards a few years ago and have never looked back.