A week with brands dialed down (& some photos)

by drm on March 12, 2010

We’re two-thirds of the way through a week of vacation at the Bahama Beach Club in Treasure Cay in the Abacos Islands. We’ve had a relaxing week with minimal distraction, changeable weather and a lot of beach time.

This hasn’t been a media-free experience: our condo has wi-fi service and a couple of flat-screens equipped with Direct TV. But the lure of the Great Abaco Sea is much more compelling, so we’ve been able to shift the rhythm of our day-to-day life.

Tami pointed out one big difference in our world: the absence of pervasive branding messages. The island is a lot like the world was back in the 70’s — no big brands, no blare of marketing and advertising, no pressure to capture your attention. What a difference.

Here are a few photos from down on the beach. This is a remarkably beautiful place.

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The Kelsey Group examines NCI’s DigitalSherpa initiative

by drm on March 12, 2010

Over the past year, the team at NCI has been developing a social marketing service under the umbrella of Digital Sherpa for local advertisers. The service was launched commercially into the multi-family market last August and into the home design market in December.

Our attention over the past months has been focused on executing on our value proposition for our clients. The core of the proposition is to leverage social media tools and content creation and curation in order to expand a customer’s digital footprint. The outcome is increased web traffic through improved Google juice and increased connectedness with their community of interest.

To execute these propositions at a low monthly price to our customers while delivering measurable results, we’ve been building and fine-tuning our business processes and bringing on board a group of talented and enthusiastic professionals excited to pioneer the next wave of internet marketing.

Our activities attracted the attention of a leading analyst in the local media space, Peter Krasilovsky, who heads up the Marketplaces advisory service at The Kelsey Group. Peter asked to look under the hood and has issued summary report about DigitalSherpa.

Here’s how he framed the report in his alert to clients:

Will vertical advertising be replaced, in whole or in part, by search engine optimization? That’s the question companies are grappling with as they consider that many leads are coming from articles and other media that rank high in search results.

NCI, the publisher of The Real Estate Book, Apartment Finder and other publications, isn’t waiting to find out. Throwing worries of cannibalism to the wind, it is building social media content for its advertisers, placing highly contextual articles, abstracts, photos and video on advertiser blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

In his report, Peter poses 5 key questions about the Digital Sherpa service:

  1. Will “content” be a compelling proposition of potential clients, even though the big SMB bets for 2010 are reputation and presence management?
  2. Will DigitalSherpa experience the same high churn that other local internet ad services have experienced with SMB’s?
  3. Can DigitalSherpa develop effective content?
  4. How much content does a service need to develop in order to deliver results to its clients?
  5. What impact will creating DigitalSherpa have on our core customer relationships?

These are great questions. I’m not going to take a stab at answering them now. With close to 1000 clients currently, we’ve going to have data-driven answers to the questions in fairly short order. That will be the time to see how things shake out in this social media marketing experiment.

The Kelsey Report advisory alert is available to subscribers here. If you have questions for Peter, you can find him at his blog, The Local Onliner.

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A model of disruption: Why do I care how I get to the NY Times?

by drm on March 5, 2010

The single content brand that I’ve had the longest relationship in my life is The New York Times.

55C5799A-FF3C-41C9-96A6-C6080D9335D1.jpgEven though I grew up in New England, a highlight of the week was when my dad went and got the Sunday papers — the Boston Globe, the Providence Journal and The New York Times.

Five decades later, the New York Times is still a key element of my daily information routine.

I’m typing this post up in the small cottage my wife and I use for our Connecticut office. There’s snow everywhere, and I can see to the end of the driveway out my window. There’s a block of blue plastic propped up against the snow. It’s today’s copy of the Times.

Someone will probably bring it in later. But I’ve already had three interactions with my favorite newspaper.

photo.jpgThe first was around 6am when I woke up and browsed the national and business stories on my iPhone. (I use the mobile browser version of the paper; their iPhone app is overly busy and slow.)

About an hour ago, I stopped for a cup of coffee and went to NYTimes.com to check out the sports and arts headlines. I read a couple of stories and then shifted over to my RSS reader (I’m a fan of the Firefox add-in Feedly.) I caught up on some of the economics writers that I like to follow.

The New York Times doesn’t have to worry about my loyalty to the brand. It stands out for its quality and its breadth.

But the New York Times does need to worry about its economics.

The change in how I access the Times is a good example of how its business model has shifted. Its audience is no longer a cohesive entity which it can leverage for commercial benefit. The audience has fragmented into distribution channels that don’t offer the same advertising payback.

As a consumer, I’m still paying a lot to get to the Times. I spend more than $1000 a year on my internet access and more than $1000 a year on my wireless access. I’m paying for the distribution pipe.The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia.png

How does the NY Times turn its brand equity with me into money? The brand doesn’t have a consumer problem and it doesn’t have a content problem. The problem is in the relative economics of distribution and advertising in the new channels that I am reliant on.

There’s not a lot of advertising on the pages I’m encountering during my interactions with the Times. And the advertising that is there is nowhere near as lucrative as the advertising in the print version of the paper.

This is a shift from being a MEDIA brand to being a CONTENT brand.

When you’re a content brand, you need to be able to extract a significant amount of your profit from the value of your content. That payment will come either directly from the consumer or from the distribution pipe (think of Premium versus Basic cable channels.)

But in this ubiquitous information world with broad redistribution of content, the distribution pipes aren’t looking to pay to subsidize content creation.

And, if the New York Times wasn’t available on my iPhone or on the web, would I change carriers? Nope. I like the content and I’ve got a long-term relationship with the brand, but I don’t think that would be enough to change my communications and internet infrastructure.

This is a problem that challenges the economics of paying people to create quality content.

Interestingly, I think it’s where the content curation discussion becomes most relevant.

A brand like the New York Times, which has tremendous reach and authority, needs to find ways to expand and deepen its relationship with its consumer across the wireless and wired web. Curating content, building applications, creating micro-communities, turning its top journalists into entrepreneurial brands, picking and choosing where to invest money in highly differentiated and traditional reporting…this is the mix of content, focus and activity that can make the digital connections into increasingly profitable areas.

Here’s how the head of the NY Times is looking at it. The key business focus is finding ways to recover the content costs. I think there’s a bigger web to spin, which will help to support the cost of original content in a different way.

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Can Twitter block happiness?

by drm on March 5, 2010

A happy life is filled with frequent and substantial conversations with others, according to a psychology study reported in Science Daily this morning.

Greater well-being was related to spending less time alone and more
time talking to others: The happiest participants spent 25% less time
alone and 70% more time talking than the unhappiest participants. In
addition to the difference in the amount of social interactions happy
and unhappy people had, there was also a difference in the types of
conversations they took part in: The happiest participants had twice as
many substantive conversations and one third as much small talk as the
unhappiest participants.

These findings suggest that the happy life is social and
conversationally deep rather than solitary and superficial. The
researchers surmise that — though the current findings cannot identify
the causal direction — deep conversations may have the potential to
make people happier. They note, “Just as self-disclosure can instill a
sense of intimacy in a relationship, deep conversations may instill a
sense of meaning in the interaction partners.”

Does this mean that a day on Twitter blocks happiness?

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Content “curation” can create authority

by drm on March 4, 2010

Traditionally, the most valued content was original.

This emphasis developed within a content model of constrained distribution and expensive production costs. When there are only a handful of distribution points for content — some magazines, books, a handful of TV station and radio stations — the way to build audience was to deliver original and exclusive content experiences.

The explosion of cable TV expanded a different kind of content model, the Commentary, where original voices offered their perspective on original content created elsewhere. Think of The Daily Show or the Mystery Theater 2000 on the SciFi station.

In today’s world, high quality production is within everyone’s reach and distribution is as easy as uploading a video on YouTube. This content that is being created isn’t bad, either. In fact, there are thousands and thousands of original voices where there were once just a handful.

Into this explosion of information comes the concept of Curation. Long-time tech journalist Paul Gillen weighed in on the value of taking a curatorial approach to content in a post about the Chile earthquake.

No longer is our problem lack of information; it’s that we’re drowning in information. That’s why curation is so important. Trusted curators who point us to the most valuable sources of information for our interests will become the new power brokers.

5B1BE826-C20F-45AE-A6D2-65CD5A0205D6.jpgIn a conversation today with two of our top editors, one shared how popular a weekly round-up of interesting blogs and bloggers in her market had become.   Doing the roundup had created an entirely new energy in her market, with new information sources appearing and more interest developing from her readers.

The blog round-up isn’t original, neither as an idea nor as content.   It is incredibly valuable for an enthusiast who wants to improve their web experience by finding good information about things that are interesting to them.

Gillen points out that the concept of curation shouldn’t be limited to media brands.

Marketers should take this trend into account. Creating new content is important, but an equally valuable service is curating content from other sources. This demands a whole different set of skills as well as a new delivery channel. It also means ditching the “not invented here” mindset that prevents content creators from acknowledging other sources.

Content curators have the task of creating trust and confidence in their social circle through the selection and sharing of quality pieces of content.  The curator needs to be able to grasp what is of interest to their social circle and to evaluate what pieces of content should be shared.

Media brands and marketers have social circles that are already primed to be exposed to high-quality content curation.  The members of these social circles have indicated preference and interest through their interaction with the brand.  Setting a goal of enriching the web experience of your social circle, and asking yourself the question, “Would my social circle find this interesting?,” when you encounter fresh content will help you build your authority and enhance your connectedness with your market.

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An insider’s look into multi-channel marketing

by drm on March 4, 2010

Over the past five years, while people have debated the future of print media, retailers have developed an approach to direct marketing that balances multiple distribution channels, including web marketing, e-mail marketing and, of course, print media in the form of catalogs.

The decision-making is fact based: How much does it cost to acquire a customer through each channel and how much does that customer buy from me? The top-level conclusions are easy to see. Retailers still invest heavily in printed catalogs, along with creating e-commerce hubs on the web and using web marketing to drive traffic.

In an interview with eMarketer, Coy Clement of clementdirect, a direct marketing consulting firm, shares some of the insights he’s gleaned developing multi-channel strategies for retail clients.

Interestingly, behavior on the website is different on the part of people who used the catalog versus those who haven’t.

People who receive the catalog tend to use the Website differently from people who haven’t received a catalog. I’ve seen cases where people who’ve received the catalog buy the featured items. They know what they’re looking for, and they use the catalog as a guide to what the company is selling. People who show up through organic search or a corporate high-traffic site have much more difficulty navigating the Website because they really don’t know what the key items are.
points out that a multi-channel marketing strategy needs to be tailored to the behavior of the target consumers and adjusted for what you learn.

Interestingly, brand retention is higher on the part of people who have been exposed to the print catalog.

What is harder to measure, but still important, is the mindshare people have. This is particularly important for companies in fairly competitive fields. Let’s say you’re in a technology business and you look at people who don’t receive a catalog and people who do, and you do blind research, not telling them who the company is. You say, “Why don’t you tell me what you think of Dell or HP?” Researchers have found over the years that customers who receive catalogs tend to have a higher brand awareness and mindshare than people who don’t.

It’s as if the physical experience of the brand leaves an imprint.

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The important of accepting yourself and engaging with the people around you in challenging times

by drm on March 3, 2010

This has been a challenging time to be in a job. The industry doesn’t really matter, although the industries that I’m close to — housing, multi-family, media, marketing and publishing — have experienced challenges on an order of magnitude that none of us could ever imagine. But for everyone, the work of going to work, doing what you’re asked to do, managing people and dealing with customers is fraught with an undercurrent of anxiety and uncertainty.

This is at the core of the national mood. A quick look at Gallup’s Economic Averages shows that the suppressed mood of Americans is barely changed from a year ago, despite a perception that the outlook for the job market is somewhat better.

Our day-to-day work life lacks the public and external validation, such as raises, promotions and bonuses, that helped boost our sense of self and well-being. I was reminded of this over the past week as we went through budget reviews at my company, NCI. Our teams have been incredible over the past two years, making balanced decisions about people, products and resources even while the business conditions have deteriorated around them. We’ve preserved our company, have improved our operating abilities and have innovated in exciting and promising ways. As we went through the presentations, I was struck by just how much has been done to define exactly what the benefit of each of our different services is, and to clear away any statement, activity or process that is not critical to delivering that benefit.

I was also struck by how little external reward there is in the current business climate. I can only recognize people and thank them.

But does that recognition have the same value as the more tangible rewards that were readily available in the past?

Maybe it does, if I’m able to be honest and authentic, and if my engagement with others is genuine.

In a reflective blog post this week,  the writer Scott Berkun exemplifies the power of candor.

In a list of his greatest professional mistakes, Berkun shuns cataloging business failures to take stock of  how aspects of his nature have kept him from realizing opportunities for growth.

Not learning to draw. I’m a visual thinker, at least some of the time. When I work with people on anything, I work at whiteboards and on big sheets of paper. But I can’t actually draw with sufficient aesthetics to warrant posting them here, or including them in books. This is a liability. But it’s one I plan to correct this year, as one of my goals for 2010 is to learn to draw. I’m working from Drawing on the Right side of the brain, and it’s going well so far.

The kind of self-awareness and honesty that Berkun promotes in this post is of great value today. In order to achieve a sense of balance, calm and productivity, each one of us can benefit from acceptance of ourselves and our circumstances. In that acceptance we’ll find tremendous opportunity.

I’ve had this conversation with a number of my colleagues over the past couple of years. At the center of rapid change, it is easy to lose your bearings.

As a manager, keeping those bearings is important to helping the people around you. I was reminded of this as I read an article from The Gallup Organization that looked at how to bolster employee confidence during these lean times.

The secret is to take a genuine interest in their future, to help them learn new skills and gain new experiences.

“This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.” Employees’ optimism about their standard of living also rises steadily with their level of agreement that they have opportunities at work to learn and grow. In fact, employees who strongly agreed in early 2009 that they have such opportunities were significantly more likely to feel their standard of living was getting better (50%) than to feel it was getting worse (33%).

The feeling of making progress against the long-term goal of their professional life creates a sense of mastery and confidence that diminishes the short-term discouragements of an adverse business cycle, the Gallup researchers say.

Two important touch points for a challenging time: Accept who you are and take a genuine interest in the people around you. These are enduring truths that are too easy to lose sight of when times are tough. But, these truths are about accepting the human spirit, being humbled by our lives and shedding the illusion that we can control the fates.

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