Some things I’ve learned… February 25, 2009

I’ve been doing more tweeting instead of full out blogging of late, and also have been on the road at seminars and with clients. Time to catch up with an actual blog post that’s more than 140 characters.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the last few weeks:

- Digital vs. traditional. Wave the white flag — no longer a debate. This came up at last week’s MediaPost Digital Marketing in a Downturn panel discussion. Razorfish’s Shiv Singh, VP of Social Media, pronounced the end of this seesaw battle over which is the more important media calling it for both. These days, consumers are watching their traditional media tvs while typing a tweet on their laptop and answering e-mail on their BlackBerry. We live in a multi touchpoint information world and it requires multichannel marketing to reach us these days. (Great multichannel marketing resource – Akin Arikan.)

- Social media is marketing. Social media is communication. Social media is… confusing? Answer: All of the above. I’m still hearing clients repeating a similar theme: “We know we need to so some social media but we’re not sure what we want to do.” And for those organizations that have plunged into social media and have blogs and videos and maybe even a Twitter feed on their sites, I’m hearing a need to sit down and actually plan a better strategy to optimize results.

On both counts I’ll give the same advice: First, go back to basics. Why are you in business? What are the goals of your web site? What does success look to you? Answer these three questions and then see how and where social media fits into your organization’s business plan.

- Twitter has exploded with new users and publicity over the last few weeks. I witnessed this especially in the DC journo community with NBC’s David Gregory, MSNBC’s David Shuster, and Air America’s Ana Marie Cox getting into Twitter a few weeks ago which then generated widespread coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico. Is Twitter just a fad that will go the way of Second Life? I don’t think so. I hope not anyway. I love the immediacy and variety of information that Twitter offers users and I believe we’re just seeing the beginning of its possibilities – especially with the recent infusion of $35 million of new VC money.

Andrew Sullivan on Watching Old Media Die December 8, 2008

Last night while checking my RSS feeds, I saw this TimesOnline column by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, about the looming death of print newspapers. Pretty timely given the latest torrent of bad news coming from the world of legacy media companies: Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, filing for possible bankruptcy this week; The New York Times borrowing up to $225 million against the value of its mid-Manhattan headquarters building; McClatchy looking for a buyer for The Miami Herald; and E.W. Scripps Co. selling the Rocky Mountain News.

UPDATE: (Within a few minutes of going live with this post, I received word that the Tribune Co. is filing for bankruptcy. Another one bites the dust. UPDATE 2: Given the company’s almost $13 billion of debt along with declining local tv and newspaper ad revenues, it’s a tough road ahead for the Tribune Co. )

Sullivan, a blogger since 2000, gives the history of his blog as to why bloggers hold such an economic advantage over these legacy media companies, despite the best efforts of these companies to beef up their websites:

“To give my own example: I started blogging eight years ago. My once quirky blog, born in time to cover the 2000 election campaign, has steadily grown in traffic over the years, but this year, with the election campaign and a media revolution, it went into the stratosphere. In October last year my blog got 3.5m page views; in October this year it had 23m page views. The story of the campaign, in other words, did find a readership (and page views of big online papers soared as well). The growth just didn’t occur in newsprint, and the next generation of readers – those now under 30 – barely knows what a newspaper is.

Now compare my little blog’s traffic with The Baltimore Sun, a big metropolitan paper with a long history and great reputation, featured most recently in the HBO series The Wire. It had 17.5m page views in October; The Dallas Morning News got 12m; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution got 14m. The operation largely run out of my spare room reached many more online readers than some of the biggest and most loss-making papers in the country. The economics are remorseless: as news goes online, the economic model for papers cannot survive. If advertising follows page views, the game will shortly be over.”

Will large newspapers, even if offered online-only, survive? Only time will tell. But I also agree with Sullivan that blogs are not a complete substitute because most blogs don’t have the budgets and staff to do in depth reporting (Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post are notable exceptions), and often rely on traditional media sources to back up an opinion or issue. Add this to the tremendous loss to the public discourse and it will be a sad day indeed, should only a few media companies manage to survive.

Web Analytics: Time to Get on Board October 27, 2008

Last week I was at the DC eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, the premier marketing conference attracting the best and brightest in web analytic and marketing people in corporations, government agencies, media and everywhere else.

This year’s theme was “Tough Times Call for Tough Measures: Increase the Effectiveness of Every Marketing Dollar” or how to create the most ROI for tight marketing budgets squeezed by the downward economy. While traditional market spend is down, online spend is up as reported in a recent MarketingProfs survey showing 60% of all marketers surveyed said they would be increasing their online budgets while 85% would be reducing their use of traditional marketing vehicles.

Even in light of increased online budgets, your boss wants to know that a dollar spent online will result in three dollars earned. How are they going to know? Web analytics. (WAA definition: Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for understanding and optimizing Web usage.)

Even in revenue-challenged businesses such as the newspaper industry, CEOs are realizing the value of informed business decisions based on web analytic metrics. James Robinson, Director of Web Analytics, The York Times, talked about starting just over a year ago with one person doing web analytics; now they have five staffers and are looking to add two more. They use web analytics to decide on print run numbers, boost subscription revenue, product development, and identification of most-read stories and sections. In a geeky cool move, after big news events such as Governor Sarah Palin’s acceptance address to the GOP convention, Robinson’s staff sends out a one page Web Analytics Bulletin to key personnel, charting online change.

Web analytics is experiencing exponential growth, both in new and improved analytic tools (Goggle Analytics just launched seven new features) along with increased buy-in from company and organizational stakeholders. In a dimmed economy, the future for web analytics and the powerhouse revenue value it can bring to companies and organizations is dazzling. Time to get on board!

Strategy vs. Tactics October 14, 2008

Strategy “is a grand-sounding word, and it is frequently misused by laymen as a synonym for tactics. In fact, strategy has a very different and quite simple meaning that flows from just one short set of questions. Who are we, and what are we ultimately trying to do here? How will we do it, and what resources and means will we employ in doing it? The four answers give rise to one’s strategy. Ideally, one’s tactics will then follow from them – that is, this is who we are, this is the outcome we wish to achieve, this is how we aim to do it, and this is what we will use to do it. But addressing the questions well can be surprisingly difficult, and if the answers are incorrect or incomplete, or the goals listed not reachable, then the consequences can be disastrous.” Thomas Ricks, author of Fiasco

I’ve sat during many a “strategic planning” meeting complete with multiple PowerPoint presentations and flip charts full of “goals” and arrowed diagrams on how to get there, but rarely does it occur to anyone around the table to ask the simple question: “Who are we and why does this business exist?” instead of jumping right into “goals” and then how to “achieve our goals.”

It’s a conversation I have with every client, and when I first ask it, I’m often met with crickets chirping silence. But I can tell you, once a business or individual has put in the sweat equity to reach a complete answer, the tactics we develop are invariably more successful.