The Media Drop

On Friday, I posted on the virtues of calling a company by its given name when writing about them. Using a different name, or combining their names with others just causes brand confusion, and worse, brand erosion. While this may not seem like such a big deal at first, realize that there are thousands upon thousands of publications and media outlets in the world, each of which offer multitudes of opportunities for spelling and grammar mistakes. Most of these publications and outlets have editors or producers who work hard to cut the errors and omissions to a minimum. In blogging, there is no editor other than yourself. This makes it doubly hard to watch what you say and make sure you’re saying it correctly. I don’t talk down to blogs that don’t concentrate on spelling and grammar *consistently*, but I might also have a tendency to not take those same blogs quite as seriously as I would another. To get credibility in the blogs “vs.” mainstream media world, there has to be some happy medium, and I’m not just talking about problematic punctuation.

Interestingly enough, the example I’m going to use is quite similar to the one I discussed last week - satellite television. I had been concerned about WSAW’s Justin Ware for incorrectly calling DirecTV “Direct TV” and DISH Network “Dish network” and other names. Today, I was reading this post by Doc Searls, where he writes about NPR being on Sirius and not XM and how the aforementioned DISH Network offers differing PBS feeds other than the local PBS channel one might receive on cable or over the air.

I have the same problem with DishTV serving up “local” network channels that include all four main commercial network affiliates, plus PBS… but not the local PBS station. So we get Fox from KTTV/11, ABC from KABC/7, NBC from KNBC/4 and CBS from KCBS/2, all from Los Angeles; but not PBS from KCET/28. Instead we get a PBS feed on which prime time seems to consist of endless Charlie Rose interviews. So “Dawn of the Maya,” which Dave Pentecost advised seeing, and which I wrote about here, was never carried anywhere among the several thousand (so it seems) channels on our DishTV system.

Now I’m not trying to make a big deal out of any of this. I’m not a satellite radio subscriber. And although I’m a DishTV subscriber, about all we use it for these days is watching parts of NBA basketball games, and listening to Sirius music channel feeds.

What’s my concern, you might ask? Well, if you read the post, you’ll notice that Doc repeatedly refers to DISH Network as “DishTV”. Upon my first read of the article, I wasn’t sure whether Doc meant to say DirecTV or DISH Network. The mishmoshing of the names definitely created brand confusion for me - it was only resolved when I moused over the link he put up for the “local programming” page on DISH Network’s site. Obviously I don’t think that Doc is intentionally creating confusion or heckling one service over another, but he is in a position of power - or influence, if you prefer - and I think he is a great candidate to put forth a proper standard when referring to a company such as in this case.

I’m not suggesting that you can’t poke fun of a company if you have an issue with their product - it’s not a terribly nice thing to do, but you can write what you please. People have “pet names” for companies all the time. Unfortunately, constant misuse of brand names creates confusion. Confusion frustrates marketers - and I don’t mean advertisers - and brand managers, and sometimes causes the loss of brand names as trademarks. We’ve all heard the examples, so there is no need to go through this exercise. I just thought this was a prime opportunity for bloggers to maintain a level of standards when referring to companies, people, places, et al. Truly, I believe this could be a positive addition to your “bag of tricks” as writers in the blogosphere. If you show respect for companies and brands, they should do the same towards you. Think about it, you are a brand yourself. While satire is one thing, if someone started confusing my site’s name with two or three others, I would do everything I could to fix that issue. And when you’re dealing with what amounts to a two horse race like the satellite television market, confusion is the last thing a consumer needs.

[ed: Thanks to Steve Rubel over at Micro Persuasion for trading emails with me on the subject.]