My book, The New Influencers, has been assigned as a textbook in a few classes around the country. It’s fun to read (and occasionally comment upon) the things people say. This spare photo essay came across by Google Alerts this morning. I’m not sure what motivated the Emerson College student to juxtapose social media marketing and ice cream, but I’m pleased that she chose such a good brand!
Last week, I suggested that people’s information consumption habits have changed permanently as a result of tools like Google Alerts and RSS feeds. These technologies make it possible for people to subscribe to keywords rather than publications. While media brands will always matter, their importance will decline as people become more accustomed to selecting information by topic and new trusted brands emerge from the world of social media.
So what does this all mean to marketers? A lot. No longer is success a matter of placing messages in a few mass media outlets and hoping for the best. Marketers will need to segment their audiences and their media selections much more carefully in the future. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they also have the means to influence media more directly and even to become the media, if they so choose.
Let’s look at segmentation first. It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is in a terrible state. Circulation is declining between 6% and 10% annually and their audience is aging. A 2005 Carnegie Corp. survey estimated that the average age of a regular newspaper reader is now 55 and climbing. That figure is 61 for regular viewers of the TV evening news.
The trend is quite different in other media, however. Some print magazines are actually growing circulation. Runners World, for example, has added 200,000 subscribers in the last three years. In some emerging overseas markets, even newspapers are quite healthy. Also, while network television viewership is declining, some cable outlets are growing nicely.
This means you need to consider the audience you’re trying to reach and match it to the media you choose. Older customers can still be served effectively through mainstream media, while the under-30 age group requires a very different approach.
Segmentation also applies to interests. Technology enthusiasts have moved swiftly to the Web, a trend that has been dramatized by the collapse of many consumer electronics and corporate IT publications. However, traditional lifestyle media such as cooking, travel and fashion are holding up quite well. A big reason is that people interact differently with these products. Topics that are news- or transaction-driven migrate more quickly online than those that emphasize aesthetic appeal. The last time I checked, Brides magazine was still thick with ads.
The more intriguing opportunity for marketers is to become the media. As I noted last week, search engines don’t have brand loyalty. The rise of super-bloggers like Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble demonstrate that trusted brands can grow quickly online. Regular readers may be tired of hearing me say this, but if you aren’t optimizing all of your business communications for search, you aren’t doing your job.
Google is now people’s first stop for information and insight on nearly every imaginable product. You can gain an unnatural advantage over even very large media brands by understanding which keywords bring people to your site and then optimizing around those terms. This is what I mean by “you are the media.”
But it isn’t just you. Other trusted brands are emerging online and those people can also be influenced to drive home your message. Using the right keywords in your communications to these new influencers can help drive your brand’s awareness through search. Sometimes you want to drive traffic to your own website, but at other times you may prefer the endorsement of a trusted third party. Again, the key factor is search optimization. Online media rely far more heavily on search visibility and external links than circulation lists. Use the same tools they use and you can piggyback on their success with astonishing speed.
From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
One of the most valuable newsletters I receive is called Knowledge@Wharton, an information-packed digest of the latest insights from the faculty and associates of the University of Pennsylvania’s famed business school. An interview this week caught my eye because it deals with tactics for adapting to today’s very challenging business environment.
Gregory Shea and Robert Gunther have written a new book called Your Job Survival Guide: A Manual for Thriving in Change in which they draw a wonderful analogy to today’s chaotic business world and whitewater kayaking. The authors describe the current business environment as one of a permanent whitewater, in which mass confusion reigns and few safe havens appear to exist.
Whitewater is scary to the uninitiated, but to seasoned kayakers, it’s the height of exhilaration. Whitewater is fun because, while frightening, it doesn’t have to be dangerous if you know what to do.
Experienced kayakers know not to dive in to a whitewater and ride it to the end. Instead, they navigate the rapids in stages. Between bursts of activity, they pull off to the side in little pools called eddies, catch their breath and prepare for the next stage in the journey. The trip is basically a process of navigating between eddies.
What a wonderful analogy! The technology world is unquestionably chaotic right now, even without the financial meltdown. Constant change frustrates predictability. The idea of building a career by mastering a single discipline and applying it for decades is as dead as the manual typewriter. Programmers know this. Anyone who has navigated the industry’s migration from Perl to Python to Ruby on Rails, for example, knows that expertise in one discipline doesn’t guarantee long-term career success. However, a core expertise in scripting is valuable in all scenarios.
The key is to understand your core skills and to learn to apply them in areas where there is market demand. Seek the eddies while constantly scanning the horizon for the next set of challenges.
I’ll tell a personal anecdote that’s relevant. I was trained as a journalist because that field was a natural outlet for my skills as a writer and storyteller. Early in my career, I discovered that the technology field offered the best opportunity to apply those skills. That served me well for nearly 20 years, but in the late 1990s, the market began to change. Print publishing was dying in the technology market, so I jumped to an Internet startup and spent the next six years learning the unique demands of that medium.
Upon striking out on my own in 2005, I quickly discovered that yet another new opportunity was emerging in the field of social media. Millions of people, and many thousands of businesses, were going online to become, in effect, publishers. It was quickly evident to me that the disciplines I had learned in 20 years of technology journalism were very relevant in this new world. People had the capacity to publish, but most of them lacked the skill to communicate in compelling ways. The skills I had learned in 25 years of publishing were still relevant, even though the medium and the audience had completely changed. Today, I’m applying those skills in a manner that I couldn’t have imagined a decade ago.
The process has been scary at times, but it’s also been rewarding never boring. That brings me back to the analogy of whitewater rafting.
In the interview with Wharton, the two authors talk of the Eskimo roll, which is a maneuver that kayakers learn to adjust to tumultuous conditions. Instead of fighting rough water, veterans can strategically capsize their craft to protect themselves against obstacles. For most boaters, capsizing is a disaster. But for kayakers it’s an essential coping skill, as long as they can fight the natural human tendency to panic.
Many of us are feeling a little capsized right now, and the panic reflex is kicking in. Keep in mind that we are all wrestling with the same uncertainties and trying to figure out survival strategies. No one has the answers. Focus on keeping your core skills sharp and apply them creatively to whatever opportunities this tumultuous market presents. You will come out OK. Although it might not hurt to be ready to do a few Eskimo rolls along the way.
@dunkindonuts joins @starbucks in the Twittersphere
Looks like a battle to the death (with two shots of amaretto, no froth in the milk).
Wall Street Grows Bearish On Online Ad Market
J.P.Morgan slashes its outlook for the second time in two months. While it still sees growth in online spending, display advertising is flat and all other categories will be down from 2008.
Interactive Ad Spending Will Top Out in 2009: Report
Looks like a rough year ahead for ad spending of all kinds. Print and broadcast will take the biggest hit, but even most categories of online ad spending will stay flat or fall, according to Borrell Associates.
People Search Engines Gain Sophistication
Emerging services act as a nexis point for information about individuals. New services scrape content from around the Web and increasingly mine public databases to enhance profiles. Quoting:
People search engine Spock is working on a service that will give users access to public records stored in public databases across the Web. The service, scheduled to launch mid-January, will have a $1.99 monthly service fee. Subscribers will gain access to links and data mined from government and municipally databases such as mortgage brokers and courthouses, as well as social network pages at MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn.
BusinessWeek Rounds Up Twitter Wannabes
Yammer is a microblogging service for enterprises that lets companies create private discussion groups. Blip.fm attaches music clips to short messages. Zannel attaches photos. Seesmic adds video-sharing. “Twitter co-founder Biz Stone expects the site’s user base to grow 10 times its current size in the next 12 months.”
Capturing social media success in a bottle
Gary Vaynerchuk grabbed national visibility with a video series about wine. Now he’s dispensing social media advice. Quoting from the piece: “Companies go into social media half pregnant,” he says. “They want to be involved, but don’t want to put in the time to be authentic and real and execute properly.” What else is on his technology-loving radar? “I am very high on Twitter and Ustream, and I think Seesmic has a dark horse chance to be extremely important,” he says.
Is YouTube the right pipeline for you?
Examples of recent social media campaigns. Quotes from the article:
Amazon MP3 is a simple concept — Twitter users simply sign up to Amazon MP3, which sends alerts about special MP3 download deals and includes a link where they can take immediate action. The model appears almost too simple, but since its launch, more than 5,700 people have signed up for this quick and easy direct connection with a global brand.
Fiserv launched a Facebook application called MyMoney that lets users search, join and manage funds from their credit union account from their profile pages. To leverage Facebook’s viral capabilities, every person who adds the MyMoney widget then alerts their friends, which creates a powerful, self-propelled ripple effect.
Coca-Cola recently released a Facebook application for its brand Burn. The application allows users to create a customizable virtual avatar and then “go out,” either with existing friends or new ones. The next day, users can check their avatar’s blog to see what went down the night before.The application recently crossed 150,000 installs with more than 85,000 users active on a monthly basis.
Liberty Mutual transformed a one-way conversation broadcast on TV into a site that features a blog and video, all designed to get people to take a more active role in their community — all while interacting with the Liberty Mutual brand.
Great (Media) Depression Looms
Diane Mermigas paints a gloomy picture for ad spending, saying no one really knows how deep the recession will be or how long it will last. Using Disney’s recent dour earnings report, she predicts continuing broad declines in mainstream advertising spending and a dramatic slowdown in online ad growth. Quoting Mary Meeker: “The best way to counter the unknown depth and breadth of the recession is to persevere; master the mobile Internet, learn how to monetize social networks, create a cogent business model, get a foothold in emerging markets and provide digital consumers with value.”
LinkedIn and Reid Hoffman: Recession Ready – BusinessWeek
BusinessWeek profiles Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and one of the most successful investors in Silicon Valley. His advice to startups: it’s all about financing. Get your hands on the money first and then worry about developing the product. Many Web 2.0 startups won’t make it through the coming downturn, he says. Assume that those who do have a long-term value proposition.
Quoting from the article:
Recent casualties: Music site Social.FM, travel site TripHub, and news site Thoof have closed their doors.Seesmic, a Web video company, laid off 7 of its 21 employees in October.
Hoffman’s advice to entrepreneurs is hard-boiled pragmatism. Hoffman urges them to focus first on financing—and only later to hone a product or service. He describes the launch of a company as a sea crossing. The financing rounds are islands, where each venture can replenish its provisions. The goal of the product strategy is to carry them to the islands. In short, it’s the financing, not the products, that keeps them alive
Cell phones part of traffic monitoring network
Your cell phone can now be turned into a transciever that tracks the speed of traffic. When merged with data from thousands of other cell phones, municipalities can create real-time maps of traffic conditions and alert drivers of routes to avoid. This is experimental at this point. Developers say the whole thing is anonymous and that no one will be able to track your route or speed. The software can be downloaded for free.
From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
Nearly a decade ago, a well-funded startup called Storage Networks promised to revolutionize the data center by moving enterprise storage into the cloud. Customers would keep their production data off-site in a highly secure facility and access it over the Internet. Unfortunately, the concept of cloud computing was unknown at the time, and the Internet itself was neither fast nor robust enough to permit large corporations to get comfortable with the idea. Storage Networks flamed out.
Now EMC is taking a run at a similar idea using the concept of cloud storage. Its technology, called Atmos, offers a glimpse of how far the cloud concept has come in a few short years and how its emergence as a new platform could drive a new wave of innovation.
As described by EMC, Atmos is a lot more than just a new breed of network storage. The distributed technology uses an object model and inference engine to make intelligent decisions about where to store, copy and serve data. With the world as its data center, Atmos is said to be able to flexibly move information to the point where it can be most efficiently served to the people who need it. For example, if a cliffhanger election in Florida causes a surge of interest from local voters, election results data could be automatically routed to nearby servers.
Intelligent routing is just one of the intriguing ideas that the cloud supports, and it doesn’t have to apply just to storage. In the future, virtual data centers will consist of computing resources spread around the globe. Server power can be flexibly deployed to regions that need it. Backups could be administered at a high-level. For example, an organization could specify dual redundant backups for some critical data but only a single backup for less important information. When the entire fabric is virtualized, this kind of flexibility becomes part of the landscape.
At this point, Atmos is still brochureware, and EMC isn’t sharing any customer experiences. But I think the concept is more important than the product. Very large and distributed cloud networks can theoretically provide users with almost unlimited flexibility and economies of scale. Systems management, which is an expensive and technical discipline that very few companies do well, could be centralized and provided to all users on the network. Customers should be able to define policies using a simple dashboard and let the inference engine do the rest.
We are only in the early stages of realizing these possibilities, but the emergence of real-world cloud computing platforms will usher in a new era of innovation. Platform shifts invariably do that. Coincidentally, NComputing this week will announce an appliance that turns a single desktop PC into as many as 11 virtual workstations. The company claims that the technology lowers the cost per workstation to about $70.
When applied to a cloud of servers, you can imagine technology like this scaling much higher. Instead of having to run around supporting hundreds of physical workstations, IT organizations would only have to worry about a few powerful servers providing virtual PC experiences to users. Move those servers into the cloud, and you can begin to apply best-of-breed security, resource and systems management to each user. The economies of scale become very compelling very fast.
The biggest leaps in technology innovation take place whenever platforms shift. The cloud is now beginning to come into its own as a legitimate platform. Things should get pretty exciting from here.
Paul Dunay
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Paul Dunay for his weekly “Buzz Marketing for Technology” podcast. This was a treat for me because I can honestly say that I have listened to every one of Dunay’s brief, provocative interviews for the last year. He asks great questions. The only other podcast I never miss is Eric Schwartzman’s On the Record…Online.” So tune in and hear us discuss questions like, “If you could only have one social media tool, what would it be?” And subscribe to Dunay and Schwartzman if you want to keep abreast of what the thought leaders in social media are talking about.
From my weekly newsletter. Sign up in the subscription box to the right.
Recently, I had the chance to speak to two classes of junior and senior public relations majors at Boston-area colleges about changes in the media landscape. I find these sessions to be as enlightening to me as they are to the students because I learn a lot about their preferences and motivations.
With the accelerating collapse of the newspaper industry fresh in my mind, I was particularly interested to understand their news reading habits. “How many of you have read a daily newspaper either in print or online within the past day?” I asked. Nearly every one of the 45 hands in the two classes went up. “How many of you subscribe to a daily newspaper?” I followed up. Only one student raised her hand.
Welcome to Generation Y, the group of people born in the last 30 years who define the future of business and media. Every one of the students in these classes has grown up in a world where information is free and instantly available. The concept of paying for news is as foreign to them as the horse and buggy.
These students will enter the workforce over the next five years and they will shake our assumptions to the core. While they have some brand loyalty, their real affiliation is to information.
What do I mean by that? Well, if you’re like most communications professionals, you probably subscribe to several Google Alerts. This service e-mails you whenever the terms you specify – such as your name, your company name or a topic that interests you – turns up in Google’s search index. Google Alerts have no concept of brand. An article on an obscure website is as likely to top the list as one in The New York Times. When you use Google Alerts, your loyalty is to the topic, not the source.
If you are a TiVo user, you know that you can subscribe to programs based on actors or even subject matter. You don’t care which network carries the program; your loyalty is to the content.
These are just two examples of the ways in which attitudes toward media brands are changing. While trusted sources will always have a special value, we are constantly discovering new sources of trusted information and modifying our assumptions about the value of trust. For some information, we still want to consult the big media brands in order to get the real story, but for less important information we might be satisfied with any source as long as we get the basic facts.
The great equalizer in this equation is search. Computers have no brand loyalty and search engines are tuned to deliver the results that best match our queries, even if the source is unknown to us. Search is, in effect, the new circulation. In the pre-Internet days, we gave publishers permission to get a slice of our attention for a one-year period. This had great value to the publishers because they could be reasonably certain of a known audience for their products.
In the new world, there is no certainty beyond relevance to the terms that an unknown audience may or may not find interesting. This is pretty scary if you’re a publisher.
It’s scary for marketers, too. But it’s also liberating. Next week I’ll discuss some of the implications of the death of media brand loyalty on our assumptions about marketing and public relations.
A few weeks ago, I participated in a webcast title of “Using Online Conversations to Turbo-Charge Your Business!” and sponsored by social network provider Lithium. We got quite a few questions that I wasn’t able to answer in the allotted hour. Because of travel and other commitments I have been unable to get to them until now. Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to answer most as blog entries. Here are the first 10 responses. Please feel free to comment, disagree or build upon my answers.
Q: Do you know how forums have helped “turbo-charge” organizations that provide psychological help (advice, life-coach-esque, etc.) as opposed to tangible products?
Medical advice, including psychological self-help, is one of the most popular topics on social networks. Nearly every lifestyle network has one or more areas devoted to peer support regarding medical conditions, depression, weight loss, life changes and other intensely personal issues. It’s possible to set up your own network, but it may work better to become involved in one of the existing networks as a domain expert. Many network operators are happy to accept people who can provide sound advice.
Q: How have employee moderators benefited online communities?
Employee moderators can be very effective at keeping forms on topic, enforcing appropriate behaviors and dealing with unruly visitors. Because employees know the subject matter of the community, they are well-qualified to serve as sources of authority. It’s important to choose wisely, however. You need people who aren’t easily rattled, have excellent domain knowledge and strong interpersonal skills. Not everyone combines all those attributes.
Q: Isn’t a lot of audience information actually “misinformation”?
Because online communities have few arbiters to validate content, the likelihood of misinformation is certainly higher. Generally accepted standards are emerging that enable communities to police themselves. For example, active members who have a large number of friends and positive comments and/or peer ratings about their contributions are generally considered reliable sources. Mainstream media and other trusted sources also serve a vital function in linking to the sources of information that they trust. It’s true that there is more onus on the reader to filter good information from bad, however it is unlikely that bad information will stand for long without being corrected by others. Communities have been proven remarkably effective at that winnowing out process.
Q: How can we not edit /censor certain members when they are clearly offensive to other members?
I don’t mean to imply that you shouldn’t censor people whose behavior is offensive. As a rule of thumb, give unruly members two chances to mend their ways and then cut them off. Be careful, however, that you don’t censor people for disagreeing with you. Differences of opinion should be tolerated, but offensive behavior should not.
Q: Are communities a B2C phenomenon? Or is a B2B community viable? If so, how are B2B communities different from B2C communities?
Most communities at the moment are B2C., but there are some notable examples of B2B success. In the information technology sector, sites like IT Knowledge Exchange, ITToolbox and SlashDot provide expert advice between peers. Many technology vendors also host active forums and employee blogs. Outside of technology, LinkedIn has become the social network for business professionals. Sermo serves physicians. Sphinn is a social networking site for marketing professionals. There are many others. In general, B2B communities tend to be more technical, because the participants assume as higher-level of domain knowledge. They also tend to be more focused on buying and deployment advice.
Q: What are your thoughts on policing who joins your community? My concern is with competitors joining to do covert intelligence missions.
The level of policing depends upon the propriety of the content. If you are planning to start a small and highly focused community for the purpose of market research, members should probably be required to submit business cards, consent to a phone interview and/or sign a nondisclosure agreement. However, many social networks are simply set up for the purpose of gathering general information about customer preferences and needs. In those cases, it’s easier to provide open access and simply limit the domain of topics you discuss.
Q: Please help reconcile the 300 – 400 group size that Paul said should be split with the fact that only 2% of users are active posters
The 2% rule applies to unstructured and unmoderated networks. In cases where the members are invited into an exclusive group and expected to actively contribute to a discussion, it is entirely appropriate to prompt lurkers to speak up and, if necessary, to “fire” unresponsive members. A single moderator should be able to manage a group of 300 members by prompting reluctant participants to contribute.
Q: Do you have an idea of how much super users of a website use the products? Is there a correlation or can this vocal minority actually not be big users of the product?
There is actually evidence that super users are less likely to be active buyers, in large part because they have already bought into the company’s product and are enthusiastic about it. The value of these people is that they have knowledge and credibility with their peers. In other words, their word-of-mouth value exceeds their monetary value. While they may not be big spenders, they can influence others in significant ways
Q: Is the process for granting permissions and privileges for super-users automated?
You can automate the process in the same way that airlines automatically upgrade passengers who have flown a certain number of miles. For example, community members who contribute a defined number of comments or reach a certain rating level may be automatically “promoted” to a higher status. It is often helpful, though, to have a human being involved in the process to provide that all-important human touch, ensure consistency and prevent scams.
Q: What about legal issues of supporting customer-to-customer communication?
I’m not a lawyer, but in my experience, legal exposure is not a problem as long as the appropriate disclaimers are posted and members agree to terms and conditions. A company should never put itself in a position of vouching for information it does not know is true, no matter what the source.
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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.
Tomorrow, Americans will choose between two presidential candidates who have very different ideologies. Although John McCain and Barack Obama both agree in principle on the need to improve the U.S.’s technology competitiveness, they disagree on some issues that are important to technology professionals. Here is an overview of their similarities and differences on some critical technology policy issues.
Both candidates agree on the need to hire and train more teachers with technology skills as well as to improve the competitiveness of American students in science and technology.
McCain proposes to fully fund the Bush administration’s America Competes Act, which provides a variety of educational investments.
Obama supports doubling federal funding for basic research over ten years and promoting the National STEM Scholarship Database Act, which would create a database to coordinate information on financial aid opportunities available in science and technology
Here, McCain is more specific than Obama. His initiatives include:
Obama also supports making the R&D tax credit permanent, but his tax plan is more oriented around individuals and families. He does support tax credits for small businesses and corporations that invest in jobs in the United States.
both candidates believe government should be a standard-bearer for effective use of information technology and each is quite specific in how they will get there.
McCain promises to create a nationwide public safety network by the end of his first term that would support first responders in emergencies. He wants to set up more Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs), in which industry and government enter into public/private projects. He believes more government services should be available online and that the government should use videoconferencing and collaborative networks more effectively. Finally, he proposes to “ensure that Administration appointees across the government have adequate experience and understanding of science, technology and innovation.”
Obama focuses on accountability, which he says has been lacking in the Bush administration. He pledges to use “cutting-edge technologies” to create a new level of transparency and accountability for government and to appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to coordinate infrastructure, policies and services across federal agencies. He also pledges to reinvigorate antitrust prosecution.
Obama also proposes specifically to invest $10 billion per year over the next five years to create standards-based electronic health information systems, including electronic health records. He also seeks to invest $150 billion over the next ten years to enable American engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs to advance alternative energy.
The Obama campaign has probably made better use of the Internet as a campaign tool than any previous candidate. Not surprisingly, Obama supports broad expansion of Internet access to every American. However, McCain’s objectives are similar in many ways.
McCain proposes to “encourage private investment to facilitate the build-out of infrastructure to provide high-speed Internet connectivity all over America…and allow local governments to offer such services, particularly when private industry fails to do so.” He also wants to establish a “People Connect Program” that rewards companies that offer high-speed Internet access services to low-income customers. He opposes “net neutrality” in favor of “an open marketplace with a variety of consumer choices.”
Obama proposes to provide “true broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation’s wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives.” He also wants to give parents more control over information their children see on-line while vigorously enforcing laws against people who try to exploit children. He supports net neutrality.
Both candidates want to see America become more competitive in overseas technology markets. Both support cracking down on intellectual property theft abroad.
McCain sees to expand the number of H-1B visas to enable US companies to employ more foreign workers.