Articles Index: After Thought
One of the most interesting aspects of the econtent world today are widgets: third-party applications that companies build to embed into major content platforms. Used by companies to build a brand and share ideas, applications are an overlooked way to deliver content.
I have had an opportunity to casually explore the attitudes of hundreds of large and small companies whose employees attend my New Rules of Marketing seminars and keynote speeches. Through my process of very unscientific questioning, I estimate that more than 25% of companies block employee access to YouTube, Facebook, and other social networking sites.
The techniques that lead to marketing success online are dramatically different than traditional marketing taught in school or that you've likely learned on the job. In fact, to succeed with web marketing, your existing knowledge about advertising and public relations will be counterproductive.
I recently spent the day with my editor and his colleagues on the marketing, editorial, and PR teams at my publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. We had wide-ranging discussions the release of the Amazon Kindle version of my book. While the Kindle is new, John Wiley & Sons isn't. I can point to a number of things that are evidence of how Wiley is tuned in today, behavior that's indicative of why it has thrived for 2 centuries.
In my 4 years of college, I don't ever recall giving the authors of the books we were reading for class any thought. I vaguely recall Milton Somebody wrote my Economics 101 text, but I don't recall any other authors' names. I never met any authors of the textbooks I used, and they were not a part of my learning experience whatsoever. There is a new model for learning today, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it.
Whenever I begin a speech, I ask a series of four questions and have the audience raise their hands if the answer to a question is "yes."
Dear Warner Music Group Executives:
The BBC reports that 20 million people wanted to purchase tickets to the historic Led Zeppelin show held at the O2 Arena on Dec. 10, 2007. Needless to say, with only 20,000 tickets available, there were many disappointed fans who couldn’t be there when the band took the stage for the first time in 19 years.
I have strong evidence that “negative” headlines often generate a lot more clicks than “positive” ones. Why do tabloid newspapers put scandals on the cover? Because those big, fat, nasty headlines sell newspapers. Several of my blogger friends have experimented with negative headlines with fascinating results. For example, Jonathan Kranz, a freelance copywriter who works with companies to create marketing materials has a link on his site www.kranzcom.com: “Important Reasons NOT to Hire Me.” Here are some of the reasons: “You like jargon,” “You want to play it safe,” and “You like vague messaging.” Kranz says the negative word “NOT” attracts attention.
As the web has made communicating with reporters and editors extremely easy, breaking through and getting a journalist’s attention using the email methods everyone else uses has become increasingly difficult. These days, anyone can find the email addresses of reporters in seconds, either through services that sell subscriptions to their databases of thousands of journalists or simply by using a search engine.
While it might seem that choosing the 100 companies that matter most in the econtent industry is our biggest challenge in this issue, I find the more difficult (and fun) aspect of participating in the selection of the annual EContent 100 list is figuring out what the correct categories are and which companies go in each. As we revise the taxonomy of econtent companies, each year we seem to have more discussions about what company goes into what category than we do about the merits of individual companies.
While releasing financial results first via the company IR website and RSS feeds and then through a news release sent to one of the press-release distribution services may seem a small and obscure change, it signals that Sun takes direct digital delivery of information very seriously.
As people use search engines to find the information that interests them on the web and browse from one site to another via links, I'm struck by how arbitrary the fences that many organizations build around their content are. The various parts of a typical corporate site or online news portal need to be broken down for the sake of visitors and potential customers.
The most effective way to market products and services online is to develop thought leadership-based content that existing and potential customers will actually want to read.
Prior to YouTube making video commonplace on the web, you’d only see small forays into corporate video and usually these efforts were mundane and predictable—things like a broadcast of the CEO speech at the annual meeting. Well, okay, some people might watch, but unless the CEO makes a dramatic gaffe, a video like that is unlikely to go viral (develop pass-along value). However, I’m increasingly seeing effective forays into viral video marketing.
I have been in and around content syndication since 1983. Just writing that sentence makes me feel like an old-timer, yet I remember as if it were yesterday how bond prices and news were the fuel of the bond-trading work I did right after college. Young men bellowed into multiple telephones—buying and selling as a result of the syndicated prices and news that appeared on the Reuters and Dow Jones Telerate screens.
After witnessing many econtent companies start up, grow, sometimes die, occasionally go public, and often be acquired over the past (gasp) 24 years, I've finally come to the realization that the best companies follow a defined birth and growth process. Initial sparks of an idea typically come from a founder who identifies a market problem that is solved by technology. The founder-turned-entrepreneur then either self-funds or finds seed funding to build an initial product, which is typically released into the marketplace after months or years of development effort. So far, so good.
Online media rooms provide many lessons in leveraging the value of econtent. This is the one place on any type of organization’s site where marketers and communicators act like publishers to create valuable and original content that reaches all of their constituents.
As a marketer and communicator, I’m fascinated with what companies are doing in Second Life, the 3D online world entirely built and owned by its nearly two million residents. The Second Life economy is built on the Linden dollar in which millions of U.S. dollars (at the current exchange rate) change hands each month. But just as in other social networking sites (like MySpace and Facebook), marketers and communicators who participate are viewed with contempt
The web has transformed the once lowly news release into a strategic marketing tool used by thousands of smart organizations to reach buyers directly. What was once a paper document (typically sent via fax and only to journalists) has morphed into a way for marketing and PR people to deliver messages directly to consumers and professionals alike. Now, the challenge is to write and distribute a release that will be read by all kinds of people with access to news releases online, not just a handful of journalists.
On the web, marketing and communications has shifted from the one-way, one-size-fits-all approach of TV advertising to delivering just-in-time and just-right content to consumers and internal audiences. Successful web marketers understand that online, content sells ideas. It brands an organization as worthy to do business with. Companies, non-profits, political campaigns, and rock bands are the new publishers, delivering ideas and stories just like traditional media companies--and RSS needs to be part of the publishing plan.
For marketers, one of the coolest things about the web is that when an idea takes off, it can propel a brand or company to fame and fortune. For free. Whatever you call it—viral, buzz, or word-of-blog marketing—having other people tell your story drives action.
So what does a publisher get when the editors choose to purchase an “exclusive” piece of content? How about when it’s baby pictures and the price tag is several million dollars? From a marketing perspective, People Magazine in the U.S., Hello! in the U.K., and New Idea in Australia invested to secure the rights to Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt’s baby pictures in order to build tremendous buzz. Sure, print copies of People Magazine jumped off shelves, generating revenue. But enough to pay the tab for the rights to be the first to show the world Shiloh’s plump baby lips? Probably not.
Before the web created micro-markets for virtually any business niche or quirky hobby, people were without information and places to do business. Not anymore. Yet while most content executives understand that there is now information available on the web on any topic, many are still unsure how to take advantage of the opportunity.
The big takeaway for me is the perception that our industry faces a new content cannibalization scare. The old scare, “free information will cannibalize fee,” which was intense for much of the early 2000s, is still simmering on the back burner. The new scare, the idea that offering micro-content will cannibalize subscription sales as well as the sale of large reports, now tops many publishers’ lists of professional neuroses.
Marketing people in technology companies don’t know what winning looks like. It’s not that we marketers don’t want to win. We do. But we have a collective difficulty aligning our departmental goals so that they are in sync with the rest of the company. Think about the goals that most marketers have. It usually takes the form of an epic to-do list: let’s see, well, we should do a few trade shows, maybe create a new logo, produce some T-shirts, and oh yeah, generate some leads for the salespeople. Well, guess what? Those aren’t the goals of your company!
Communicating with target audiences through Web content initiatives is also an extremely cost-effective form of marketing. If you’ve got an hour or two a week to devote to it, a blog is virtually free to produce. Contrast that to, say, an expensive direct mail campaign. Other forms of marketing also take time to produce, but cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to execute. As much as I rant about Web content as a viral marketing tool on the speaking circuit and riff about it on my blog, I’ve never had detailed insight into the specific metrics around one viral marketing effort using Web content—until now.
In our dynamic industry, new companies form all the time. Start-ups in the content technology business as well as online publishing ventures appear at such a rapid clip that it is difficult to keep up. Imagine what it’s like for the executives of a new company in this business to get their brainchild noticed in a crowded field. A typical launch involves months of planning, lots of hard work, and often a substantial budget for PR, analyst relations, and advertising I found it remarkable, then, that a new company called Squidoo was successfully launched in late 2005 without any of the traditional marketing and PR techniques.
It’s been fascinating to both observe and participate in the debate about blogs and wikis in the enterprise. Just like the hand-wringing over personal computers entering the workplace in the 1980s and echoing the Web and email debates of the 1990s, enterprise IT executives and content professionals seem to be getting their collective knickers in a twist about blogs and wikis these days. Remember when executives believed email might “expose a corporation to its secrets being revealed to the outside world”? How about when information professionals worried about employees freely using the public Internet and all of its (gasp!) “unverified information”?
With the number of blogs now in the tens of millions and the availability of niche blogs on virtually any topic, attention has shifted to the hot space of blog search. The simple truth is that it isn’t easy to find a blog post on subjects of interest. Some nifty new tagging features are beginning to make a big difference for users, but the dark side of marketing may hamper the growth of tags.
So what’s with all the nonsense words being thrown about by well-intentioned marketing people at econtent companies? Nearly every Web site I look at and almost all the press releases I receive are laden with meaningless jargon that’s just plain annoying. As I was cruising around looking at econtent company sites and press pages while serving as part of the EContent 100 decision-making group, it became clear that most companies in this business just aren’t communicating well.
I witnessed on television what I’ve often been critical about in Web multimedia use in business: the inability to search and quickly click to the precise part of content that I’m interested in. I’ve tried messing around with podcasting for things like listening to conference panels and keynotes that I missed, but my efforts always ended in frustration because I couldn’t go directly to the spot in the audio that I was most interested in. In other words, I couldn’t search on a big fat audio stream.
Analysis of free versus fee content invariably focuses on content that must be paid for by consumers in its original form (such as newspaper and magazine articles) but that is often offered for free at an advertising- and sponsorship-supported Web site. Many pundits believe that if content is offered for free in one medium, it will cannibalize another, and that’s all they obsess about. Yet despite all the debate about free and paid content business models, market observers have largely missed the flip side of free content: valuable information that individuals are eager to give away for no charge and that smart companies then aggregate for profit.
With my new book Cashing In With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers Into Buyers soon to be released, I decided to check out the book’s new Amazon.com page. Well (I thought), as long as I’m here, I might as well click my name on the author link and pay a long-overdue visit to my first book, Eyeball Wars: a novel of dot-com intrigue. OK I admit it: I was deeply into a therapeutic session of vanity searching. Heck (I justified to myself) all I’m doing is listening in on a conference call. Being a multitasking sort of guy, I might as well poke around a bit while others are talking away.
I’m sick and tired of the media elite bitching and moaning about their diminishing role in society. There’s lots of blame and finger-pointing going on at big media these days: people don’t watch network TV news “because they work long hours”; newspaper and magazine revenues are down, which is “the advertiser’s fault”; and everyone’s favorite scapegoat—blogging—is “not real journalism.” That’s the world according to traditional media. I disagree. The news cycle has changed, and with it, so must many of the rules of the game.
As I evaluate and use information products and services, one thing I look for is evidence of right-brain thinking—in products and services offered as well as in companies’ marketing and communications approaches. Sadly, we are primarily a left-brain industry. This obsession might seem trivial, but I guess my right-brain outlook on life causes me to take a holistic view of the information marketplace.
It seems like every week there’s an announcement about yet another Internet mainstreamer like Google or Amazon making a foray into the world of scholarly content. What’s going on here? Why are broad-based, general-purpose companies movi |