Recently in Media Category

I think the "earned media" meme is a useful one -- if brands want "coverage" in a world of professional AND consumer-generated media, they will have to earn it, not just pay for it. In the past, earning it was managed through PR -- the pros wrote about you because you deserved it (and you did a good job of convincing them of that fact). Today we realize that great products and great customer service can earn you accolades from the hordes of bloggers, twitters, and facbookers (and the inverse is also true).

Here's Pete Blackshaw...

This is important to internalize because maximizing earned media requires a much more fundamental shift than just "embracing social media." Setting up shop on Facebook is the easy part. Developing the brand business processes that increase odds of advocacy or favorable earned media is quite a different thing, but it's essential. If, in fact, the manner in which employees treat customers does more to drive online love (or venom) than your best advertising campaign, we have a fundamentally bigger challenge (and opportunity) on our hands.

who refers to Fred Wilson...

Earned media is media you don't buy but earn the hard way. PR is an example of earned media. Word of mouth is another. Earned media has been around forever. But it has now gotten a lot easier, thanks to the Internet and social media, to earn media for your brand, product, or self.

who refers to Jerry Solomon:

The first step is to stop the monologue and begin a dialogue. Start listening and responding. Marketers understand TV, radio and print. They remain effective but no longer as dominant. No need to abandon them. However, brands need to become equally adept at mastering the language of social networking, blogging and online content. This begins with investment in new business models. Accept more will fail than succeed. Unfortunately the only method of determining the ones that work is by putting the resources and will behind them. The brands that invest in unlocking the code will develop genuine relationships with their customers, as well they should. They earned it.

From Ad Age:

Brands aren't simply brands anymore. They are the center of a maelstrom of social and political dialogue made possible by digital media, said Unilever Chief Marketing Officer Simon Clift, who warned that marketers who do not recognize that -- and adapt their marketing -- are in grave peril.

"No matter how big your advertising spending, small groups of consumers on a tiny budget might hijack the conversation," he said. "So this internet thing is much bigger and more interesting than just finding successors to TV advertising."

Conversations happen. The world where brands can shape their identity merely through one-to-many advertising alone is over. Opinions and ideas on virtually everything (politics, sports, technology) are being shaped, formed, and solidified through social media, and brands are no exception to this.

Clift's 5 new rules for marketing (details at Ad Age):

1. Listening to consumers is more important than talking at them.
2. You can't hide the corporation behind the brand anymore -- or even fully separate the two.
3. PR is a primary concern for every CMO and brand manager.
4. Cause marketing isn't about philanthropy, it's about "enlightened self-interest."
5. Social media is not a strategy. You need to understand it, and you'll need to deploy it as a tactic. But remember that the social graph just makes it even more important that you have a good product.

I thought Arianna Huffington put this very well:

The great upheaval the news industry is going through is the result of a perfect storm of transformative technology, the advent of Craigslist, generational shifts in the way people find and consume news, and the dire impact the economic crisis has had on advertising. And there is no question that, as the industry moves forward and we figure out the new rules of the road, there will be -- and needs to be -- a great deal of experimentation with new revenue models.

But what won't work -- what can't work -- is to act like the last 15 years never happened, that we are still operating in the old content economy as opposed to the new link economy, and that the survival of the industry will be found by "protecting" content behind walled gardens.

Andrew Anker has more coverage of the Great Upheaval at Quid.Pro. I like Clay Shirky's description of an industry unwilling to confront reality:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.

So how do you move forward without obsessing on the past? Well, ironically, learning from history may help.

L. Gordon Crovitz writes in WSJ about how Bernard Kilgore transformed The Wall Street Journal when it faced a disruption of it's business model from technology as stock information, which had been the paper's core differentiator, became plentiful via radio and other sources:

The Journal had to change. Technology increasingly meant readers would know the basic facts of news as it happened. He announced, "It doesn't have to have happened yesterday to be news," and said that people were more interested in what would happen tomorrow. He crafted the front page "What's News -- " column to summarize what had happened, but focused on explaining what the news meant.

You often hear professional media dismiss blogs and other new media because, it is claimed, the latter can only do opinion, and not "real" news. First, this is simply untrue, as attested to by the emergence if hyperlocal media. But second, this attitude may have compelled the media industry to focus too much on a misperceived comparative advantage -- news -- when they could have been innovating more on the analysis side of things.

As Crovitz points out:

"Kilgore's first critical finding," Mr. Tofel wrote, was "that readers seek insight into tomorrow even more than an account of yesterday." This "may only now be getting through to many editors and publishers." Indeed, at a time when print readership is declining, The Economist, with its weekly focus on interpretation, is gaining circulation. The Journal continues to focus on what readers need, growing the number of individuals paying for the newspaper and the Web site.

Professional media have tended to view the world as a cascade, starting with their news, and trickling down to the blogs that, sometimes parasitically, feed off of them. One wonders whether the future will looks inverted from this past -- with media companies focusing on their brand advantage, and the trust that many of them still earn, by aggregating and analyzing the news that is now becoming so plentiful across the Internet.

Here's a great piece in Ad Age by Peter Blackshaw about how social media is transforming marketing, accelerating innovation, increasing leverage and helping to dramatically reduce costs -- for those that participate.

Then there's innovation -- the engine of value creation and company growth. Social media is one massive feedback loop. It's chaotic on the surface, but unmistakably efficient if you consider the life cycle of vetting a good idea or absorbing the ideas of others. If you really peel the onion on what's happening across blogs, Twitter and other online communities, brands are setting up de facto listening labs that rewrite the rules of gathering and managing feedback. We're getting more ideas faster. The funnel is broadening. The filters are sharper, more immediate and grounded in deeper levels of intimacy with the product or proposition.

I met Peter in 1994/1995 when we at Red Herring -- then only a magazine with a single AOL email address -- connected with Peter and three of his peers at Harvard Business School to help us figure out our "online" strategy. We considered three options: build a community on AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy, build our own BBS, build this new thing called a "web site." It's funny to think that at first the decision was not obvious. It was relatively easy to rule out doing our own BBS, but to that point most online communities were built within the major ISPs and that seemed rational: that's where all the people were! People forget just how powerful AOL was at one time.

In one of my favorite issues of Red Herring (which sadly I cannot find an archive of on RedHerring.com or Internet Archive. Come on Herring folks, fix those 404s!) we had Steve Case face-off against Marc Andreessen about closed v. open communities. The decision wasn't easy. You didn't get as much control as you wanted with AOL, but they had the power, the audience, the tools to build your community, and the ability to help you monetize them. On the other hand, building web sites was expensive, they looked clunky, there weren't nearly as many people using web browsers (what's a web browser??) as used AOL accounts, and so much about the experience was new and untested.

Of course, we all know how this turned out. We and the HBS crew agreed that the control and freedom afforded to us by the web would far outweigh the audience, tool, and economic advantages of the big guys. We knew our own site would cost us more to build and it would be more of a challenge to get people there and to make money, but it would be ours. We could do with it what we liked and we could grow with it. The asset we were building would be our own, not someone else's.

This is why the web won and the closed communities lost. It gave people freedom and control over what they wanted to do and stimulated a diversity that drove an incredible amount innovation that one service could simply never provide. In the end, the tools got easier (witness blogging software, for example); traffic swung dramatically online, aided by search engines; and web revenues eclipsed closed community revenues.

Looking back, I think this history is extremely informative about the way forward. And history is repeating itself. The Internet necessarily gravitates towards open over closed, decentralization, and and freedom and control moves to the edges -- for individuals and organizations -- rather then the center, even when the closed systems have an advantage of audience and tools.

But the process isn't linear. It goes in waves. The wave started with AOL, and for a time centralized power won out over distributed power. But people chose their own control and freedom over the short term benefits of audience and tools, and the audience and tools then followed.

I think we are in a similar cycle now. The mainstream social networks, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and increasingly Twitter, feel a lot more open than AOL was, but in the end, those services have the ultimate control over their users. Their logo is on the top left of the page. They determine whether and how people can design their pages or make money. They set the terms of service. The can deliver audience, but it's THEIR audience. They have great tools to create things, but within strict limits. But in social media too, as always happens on the Internet, freedom and control will decentralize. The tools and services available to build your own social media sites, just like the tools of old to help you build your own web sites, are getting much better, easier, and less expensive. And a people, brands, companies, organizations build their own social media sites, the audience will follow.

It will be different than is was before in the sense that the centers and the edges will be much more connected and symbiotic than the binary choice of closed v. open sites of the early web, but the fundamental drivers will be the same. Companies and brands should certainly learn how to market via Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, but ultimately it will be through their own sites and blogs where they will find their biggest returns.

Walter Isaacson, a pioneer in online publishing, points out in this free Time article that as advertising revenue slows, or even declines, the successful formula for making money online may shift more towards subscriptions than is has in the past.

Here's the problem statement:

According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.

This is not a business model that makes sense.

The rest of the piece discusses some of the history of online publishing and business models, and points out that with such a rapid move to free/ad supported models, and the culture that you are "evil" or "just don't get it" if you charge for content, a broadly used subscription infrastructure hasn't emerged. Previous attempts, of which there have been many, have almost all failed -- though there are many specific instances where subscription models have been successful.

I believe there is something to this. Something. There is certainly a case to be made that subscription models can work even in the face of free competition -- (most) people pay for cable when TV over the air is free, (some) people pay for satellite radio as well, iTunes is a hit, and we run a successful, paid blogging service that competes with free alternatives. You can compete on a paid basis if you are bringing something unique to the table for that price.

But I suspect that in the end the mix will still be weighted more towards the ad side. Most magazines have ad revenues that far exceed their subscription and newsstand revenue, TV advertising is bigger than TV subscriptions, and while we offer a paid product, we also offer a free product and we offer advertising services that contribute to a key part of the economic engine of blogging.

I think the call for a subscription service that could work across properties, perhaps with micropayments, is useful, if not terribly new, and we'd support it. But I'd also submit that there is another model that should be added into the mix here: tickets.

Isaacson uses a lot of offline metaphors to make the case that the internet of the future should work more like the dead wood of the past. As I've said here, I think there is something to this. But the models of the past were also built around the constraints of the past, and conditions online have changed. Meanwhile, online is becoming more and more community oriented, and yet we don't think much about how you bring offline community models online. What's an "offline community"? Well, an event, for one (and the "paid" model for an event is "tickets").

So much of what happens online is looking more like conferences than magazines. Think about Time Inc. magazine, like Fortune vs. a Time Inc. conference, like the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference.

Fortune pays a lot of money to professional journalists to write up magazine articles that are heavily edited and non-interactive. There is virtually no feedback loop (offline). Whereas the conference is an interactive experience where the editorial presence is not confined to one-way speeches by the writers, but also includes the selection of the speakers, the setting of the agenda, interviews with luminaries, often with Q & A, moderating of panels, invitations of select attendees, and of course the most important aspect is the "user generated" content in the hallways. Attendees help make a conference better -- and Fortune benefits from this -- in a way does not happen with print subscribers. Now, Fortune magazine makes a lot more money than Fortune conferences, and the logistics of physical events are difficult and expensive, but what form feels more like where the internet is going? (And by the way, conferences work on a hybrid subscription and advertising (sponsorship) model).

In short, access to communities - and properly managed and accessible communities - is something that can be sold just as much as access to content. I think this is another strategy to weave into the mix to help offline content businesses succeed online.

This is good news:

"As the president stated during the campaign, he does not believe the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated," White House spokesman Ben LaBolt told FOXNews.com.

Here is a recent Wall Street Journal article titled "Internet Killed the Video Star" which makes the point that "Straws in the wind in recent weeks suggest that the recession may be accelerating a structural change toward free or low-cost Web video -- either television or movies -- and away from traditional delivery methods, such as cable TV or DVDs." You can read the whole thing, I guess... if you want to. OR, you can just watch this video my sister Jenny and the Whatever girls made ALMOST 2 YEARS AGO which which is much more fun...

Just read an excellent white paper curated by Steve Rubel about the Five Digital Trends to Watch for 2009. Summary from Steve's blog post:

Satisfaction Guaranteed - Customer care and PR are blending as consumers use social media to demand service

Media Reforestation - The media is in a constant state of reinvention as it transitions from atoms to bits

Less is the New More - Overload takes its toll. Gorging on media is out. Selective ignorance and friends as filters are in

Corporate All-Stars - Workers flock to social media to build their personal brands, yet offer employers an effective and credible way to market in the downturn

The Power of Pull - Where push once ruled, it's now equally important to create digital content that people discover through search

The whole paper is worth reading, but for those with short attention spans, here's what he calls "macro takeaways" at the end:

Publicly engage
Companies that put many voices online stand to gain a competitive advantage as customer service moves into social media and personal brands grow.
 
Create content
As the media landscape shifts and Google rewards content producers, companies have an opportunity to create their own media to reach stakeholders directly.

Be simple and utilitarian
Now is not the time for complexity. Simplicity rules as do online applications that are continually useful and fill a void in people's lives.

The paper starts out with "Although the economy may be slowing, the digital march keeps going," but I might change that "Although" to "Because." Hard times are compelling companies innovate on how to they approach sales, marketing, and PR, and that means going digital and being clever about it. This paper is a great guide.

According to a new survey by Junta42 of corporate marketers and publishing/agency professionals, 56% of respondents said they plan to increase their content marketing spending next year, with 31% saying they would increase spending on content significantly and 25% saying they planned to increase it slightly.

And I liked this quote by Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42, via the MediaPost coverage of the survey: "More and more marketing professionals now realize that tomorrow's marketing is all about developing a conversation with customers."

Exactly.

Thanks to Auren Hoffman for the pointer to this interview in The Australian with Professor Clayton Christensen. The discussion is along the similar lines of one I had with Kevin Maney a couple of months ago and expanded on here. It's also the reason why I think the assertion that The Economist made that "Gone... is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted," is a premature judgement on the medium that may be proven wrong in 2009. Here's some of the interview, but the rest is worth reading too:

BUSINESS INSIGHT: Professor Christensen, tell us a little bit about what you think the effects of the financial crisis and economic downturn will be on the environment for innovation.

DR CHRISTENSEN: I think it will have an unmitigated positive effect on innovation.

BI: That's counter-intuitive.

Dr C: Well, it will force innovators to not waste nearly so much money.

One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend.

Statistically, 93 per cent of all innovations that ultimately become successful started off in the wrong direction; the probability that you'll get it right the first time out of the gate is very low.

So, if you give people a lot of money, it gives them the privilege of pursuing the wrong strategy for a very long time. In an environment where you've got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you'll be successful is actually much higher.

BI: In other words, what you're saying is that prosperity tends to insulate innovators from market realities and allows them to pursue their vision - a vision which is probably wrong, statistically speaking.

Dr C: That's a perfect summary of how I think the world works. The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.