I’ve been invited by Tony Silber of Folio: to sit on a panel at their annual conference with Forbes’ Dan Bigman to talk about being an Agent of Change in a publishing organization.

As the three of us kicked the topic around, it was clear that Tony was looking for a basic blueprint for how publishers can really change their organizations to leverage the digital marketplace. He was appropriately forceful with us: Don’t talk about change around the margin, talk about real changes that can help the business.

A couple of big questions immediately sprang to mind:

• Are there core underlying differences in the assumptions about print media and online media that are easily defined?
• What do you want the outcome of the change to be?
• What is getting in the way of change? Is it cultural? Is it short-sighted management? Is it resources? Is it skills? Is it desire? Is it just that there really isn’t a good model to change to?
• What frustrates the people who do the work in publishing organizations the most?
• What kind of change are our customers asking for from us? Both the advertising customer and the content customer?

The best way to get answers to questions like this is to ask. So, I’m asking. Let me know what you think.

What do magazines really need to do to change?

I’m running a workshop at Carl Landau’s Niche Media Conference in Tempe, AZ this morning.  The focus is on providing a content for niche media brands to think about social media and their business goals.

Here’s the workbook at I’m using for the presentation.  I’ll post later about the session and talk about some of the specific data points that I shared.

As the year winds down, I was curious which posts over the course of the year were the most popular. I was pleased to see that the posts that had resonated the most with all of you were ones that I felt like I’d achieved some clarity around an idea that I’d been working through. (It’s also interesting that these posts are among the most frequently accessed through search.)

The number one post was from March: Social Media Can be A Marketing Platform. This was when we were taking Network Communications into its Project Massive Network, an effort to get every person in the company using social media to broaden and intensify their professional connections.

Through the year, I kept meaning to come back to the concept of Evangelist. The word too easily connotes intense passion, while I believe that the most effective Evangelists are the ones who have completely integrated their nature with their passions, so that they communicate a relaxed enthusiasm that inspires and attracts others. Evangelism is too often associated with a mania and mono-focus that can be off-putting.

The number two most-popular post was a very detailed case study that I did in June about migrating our marketing strategy at Apartment Finder to a social media focus. My intent with this post was to demonstrate each of the steps that we had taken to extend our communications with the multi-family marketplace to multiple platforms, and our efforts to modify and adapt our messaging to the unique attributes to the platforms. This effort continues today and deserves a follow-up: the most challenging aspect of the initiative is maintaining continuity and assessing its effectiveness. Despite our intent focus, we have areas of spotty execution with our own program.

The third most-popular post was my first attempt to consolidate the thinking that I’d been doing about how a traditional publishing content workflow needed to adapt to accommodate the inclusion of social media platforms. In Thoughts on Evolving the Content Strategy in Publishing to Leverage Social Media I outlined the Sharing Model of content creation. This model outlined here as served as a framework for developing new processes at our regional home design brands, and in some instances we’ve seen significant impact on audience and enthusiasm. The process is a living work in progress.

The fourth most frequently viewed post is an down-and-dirty analysis of State Farm’s presence on Facebook. This was a period when I was trying to understand the challenges that face traditional marketing departments when implementing social media programs. The post was published in April and is one of the two most-frequently accessed posts through Google search. I recently re-visited the State Farm Facebook sites and little had changed.

In the Spring, I was doing a lot of work to try to quantify the impact of the economic decline on consumer spending, marketing outlays and media allocations. In an early April post, I pointed out the contradiction between industry research showing the effectiveness of TV and magazine advertising and the steep declines in revenue. The point: When marketing budgets shrink, the most expensive media goes first.

I’m kind of proud that a self-serving post doesn’t show up until the number 6 spot. Over a period of 6 months, we radically shifted our traffic strategy at ApartmentFinder.com in order to leverage what we percieved as our core strengths. This shift was rewarded in April when Comscore reported ApartmentFinder was solidly in the top 5 destinations for apartment shoppers on the Internet. Our work put us solidly in the consideration set for online-only marketing in the multi-family industry, and we did it despite being heavily outspent on search engine marketing traffic by our competitors.

The seventh most-popular post, from July, demonstrates how powerful social media can be. I described a disappointing customer service experience with American Express. A couple of days later, I heard from the Chairman’s Office. It doesn’t match Jarvis’ Dell experience, but it was an instructive moment in the new age of marketing and media.

A May post reporting on research that shows how effective print advertising is in driving web traffic came in at number 8. Despite multiple instances of independent research like this, many people insist of maintaing a very simplistic “Print Is Dead” position. At this point, I just shake my head and wonder why the concept of using multiple platforms to intersect with consumers to drive business activity is so hard to accept. [I very accepting of marketers who say they don't have the money to invest in premium marketing choices, whether they are online or offline. Then we can have a conversation about how to leverage their marketing resources to build their business. Just sitting around arguing about living or dead media gets old very fast.]

An October post made the top 10 and is a big search favorite: The Current State of the Economy in 5 Pictures. I realized doing this analysis that I should update the post in January to reflect the fourth quarter results. Lesson: People like pictures.

The number 10 position is taken by a post where I ranged outside of my limited sphere of knowledge to speculate about how social media platforms would change the way that people searched for information. The premise was that “human search” would develop through the filtering of content by overlapping social graphs. This is happening on Twitter and is expressed by many as crowd-sourcing. I had fun thinking about the problem and putting together the schematics. The post attracted a broad readership and started many conversations. I’m sure that those followers soon dropped off as I returned to my more mundane noodling about business models, business processing and marketing approaches.

I visited the National Association of Realtors convention in San Diego last week.

The show was markedly different than the year before. The footprint was smaller, but the energy was higher. Fewer vendors were serving the market, but the vendors that were present focused on very specific utility that would produce benefits for brokers and agents.

Talk with agents and you heard a firmness in their tone and a positiveness in their approach that was absent the year before.

The market isn’t bouncing back anytime soon, they said, but there was consistent activity and the opportunity to make money.

My colleague Todd Dubner had many of the same impressions, which he shares on his blog Being Present.

Todd was particularly struck by the approach of the entrepreneurs he met during the show:

Creative vendors are getting their mental juices going. At NCI, we believe in the intelligence of the entrepreneur. We pay attention to what innovative thinkers are chasing and try to find where people are showing signs of profit. There was just more of that at the show this year than last. The ideas that were being shopped felt more concrete and actionable with a clearer value proposition than those in the past. No one was doing the, “if I could get 80% of agents to give me a dollar” math that never works out.

We’re hearing more positive reports from the field across our company as well. More is a relative term: for the past 18 months, positive reports have been few and far between in our real estate media business. I sat down with one of our business partners in the northeast over the weekend. He’s been with our company for more than 15 years, and the anxiety that he had expressed a year ago had been replaced by a confidence that the market was recovering, slowly and fitfully, but consistently.

These are anecdotal and ground-level reads. As such, one should be cautious to not get swayed by isolated instances of positive emotion. But, the repetition of these instances, in the face of continuing negative macro conditions, suggests that the pace of business activity is picking up in such a way that people who make their living from it are feeling like they are going to be able to make their living better.

The question of whether the media business is driven by content or distribution has been a fundamental issue in media business strategy over the past two decades.

In the past, acquiring the capital in order to create the means of distribution gave companies that wherewithal to subsidize content and aggregate audience.

In the 1980′s, with the development of multiple distribution channels and increased interoperability of content because of digitization, the relative value of content and distribution began to disaggregate. In response, large media companies attempted to acquire significant distribution platforms and significant content platforms. The logic was that the businesses could be operated independently, but that ownership of both categories would create an industrial leverage that was embedded in the early media company models.

In today’s world, consumers look for content across platforms; they will migrate to branded content to the degree that the content is presented in a intelligent design that is available AND consistent across platforms.

While this new reality is largely accepted on an intellectual level, it continues to create challenges to businesses attempting to migrate their capital and business models into the new media economy. Alan Patrick of Broadstuff last week shared the outcome of a talk at the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm conference that helped to illustrate this conundrum.

David Touvre, a professor at the Williams School of Commerce, asked the attendees of the conference five questions:

1. Is media a product or a service?
2. Do you believe the “3 strikes and you’re out policy will (1)decrease, (ii)increase, or (iii)give no change in Piracy?
3. Will a policy of filtering/disconnecting give a better economic outcome than licensing for Media?
4. Will a policy of filtering/disconnecting give a better economic outcome than licensing for ISPs?
5. Will a policy of filtering/disconnecting give a better economic outcome than licensing for Telcos?

As the chart above shows, licensing is the logical outcome to the series of questions. If that’s the case, why don’t more companies shift to that strategy, focusing on creating exceptional content and leaving the distribution to partners across the board?

I’m flying out to Chicago this afternoon to sit on a panel moderated by Folio:’s Tony Silber at the Connex Live conference. The title: Big Ideas and New Opportunities for 2010 and Beyond.

The title has a positive bent, although all of us sitting on the panel have businesses with deep foundations in the print publishing world.

Tony has asked us to think about 10 key questions to prepare for the panel. Here they are:

1. When will the industry see some recovery?
2. What will that recovery look like?
3. Will we see the robust health of 2005-2006?
4. How will the business be different?
5. Are media companies being disintermediated on the reader side through
   social media and blogs?
6. Are media companies being disintermediated on the marketing side by
   social media and lead-gen and automated marketing software?
7. What are the most important things media companies can do now? Org
   structure? Approach to content creation? Layoffs? Debt reduction?
8. When we say companies need to “reset” to face new realities, does that
   mean massive losses of revenue and personnel?
9. What will the media company of 2012 look like?
10. What is the most important lesson of the 2007-2009 recession? How do you
    personally implement it at your company?

Those are critical questions without easy answers. For #1 and #2, the answer will be driven by the economy. When people buy things, people will make things, and people aren’t going to start buying things at a significantly increased pace until they feel confident that they will have a job making things. Gross simplification, but you can’t have a consumer economy without consumer income.

When will we see the robust health of 2005-2006 and how will the business be different are foundational questions: I don’t know and I wish that I did.

The answers to questions 5 through 9 are all loosely connected. The answer to one influences your answer to all the others. For a web-focused conversation about #5, see this summary of a dialogue on Fred Wilson’s blog. (Wilson gets about 12,000 unique visits a month to his blog.)

Media companies are in an environment where consumer have disparate tools to create and consume content. Traditional formats continue to be part of the media consumption mix, but the hegemony of format and audience, which has been eroded during the 14-year evolution of Internet-based media companies, feels like it has been permanently disrupted. The economic contraction is a catalyst, but the widespread adoption of social media tools, which require minimal technical expertise to implement and consumer, is a more basic change to the foundation of our businesses.

This change requires companies to answer very basic questions:

• What is my market? What are the ways that I can take product to market, build audience and, in the case of marketing-based businesses, leverage the audience for the benefit of my clients?
• What, if anything, can I charge for each aspect of my market strategy, including new and traditional channels?
• How much revenue can I create from this business mix?
• In order to generate 15% to 25% cash flow, after operating expenses, from this business, how much can I spend in expense?
• What level of debt can this new business model sustain?

Once you have a realistic set of answers to these questions, then you can shape the answers to questions #7 and #8. And the outcome of those answers gives you a picture of what your traditional media company might look like in 2012. (Of course, it doesn’t capture the picture of the emergent media company of 2012….)

The last question was thought-provoking. I’ve learned a lot over the past few years. The most powerful thing I have witnessed is the practical desire in most people to do the right thing, to arrive at a logical conclusion. I’ve seen people struggling to find answers, bewildered by the whirlwind of change they have experienced, but intensely focused on finding ways to adapt themselves and their business strategies to the realities. As the pace of change slows, and people are able to organize themselves around more stable markets, I’m willing to bet on their ability to find new, effective ways to build their businesses.

My friend Tony Silber over at Folio: posted a nice summary of my keynote at the Niche Digital Conference a couple of weeks ago.

As did another summary of the talk, Tony makes the things I said seem clearer than when I said them. In fact, he summarizes my conclusions into 5 principals for today’s publishing marketplace.

I’d like to be able to articulate the Content-Sharing Model as succinctly as Tony does:

One new approach to serving a market, is the Sharing Model. It starts, McCarthy said, with the notion that “Anything I’m interested in, people who are interested in me will also be interested in.” Based on that, then share what you have, as you get it. “Go into the market,” McCarthy said. “We have people who are knowledgeable. Let them go find things out and share them with greater frequency. It’s a level of confidence. Instead of having everything you learn go into a funnel to be produced in a magazine or as a Web site, share as it happens frequently, in an unproduced manner.”

This link will take you to an upload of the slides from the presentation.

Here’s an upload of the presentation that I gave at the Niche Digital Media conference in Minneapolis this week, with a scratchy audio overlay.  The talk is roughly 15 minutes and gives an overview of the content-sharing model we’ve been experimenting with.  Thanks to Carl Landau at Niche Media for providing the platform for the talk.

eMedia Vitals, a new online information resource, was at a couple of conferences this week reporting on what senior media execs have to say about social media one year into the great advertising contractions.

In a report from Advertising Week, Naomi Reiter shares the insights of top agency and media execs for big brands on how they are approaching social media.

Reiter summarizes the content into 8 action-oriented maxims:

• Always be truthful. “Google’s the long tail of lies,” said Schultz.
• Never sell first. Add value before anything else.
• After creating value, communicate that value to an audience.
• Consider brand voice but don’t try to control the conversation—listen instead.
• Convert audience members into brand advocates by respecting their contribution to the conversation.
• Social media is not just a marketing channel. “It’s the grease that drives our lives,” according to Schultz.
• While traditional media is like real estate (it charges to let people on its property), social media is like religion, according to GCA Savvian Advisors managing director Terence Kawaja. “You don’t know if it’s working; you just have to believe.”
• Social media is already mobile. “If you figure out a social media presence, you have a head start on your mobile presence,” said Kawaja.

I particularly like the last point.  Social media is a mobile strategy –  you are aligning your content with the mobile consumer’s information usage pattern.  [More on that in another post.]

And I take slight exception to the next-to-last point.  As long as you publish all of your mobile content from a web-based repository, like a blog, you’ll be able to track interaction with your social media content elements.

In another post on the site, Prescott Shibles summarizes the conversations at the Niche Digital conference, where I delivered the keynote.  You’ll find the post here. He does a very good job of making sense out of my comments, and fleshes out the conversation with perspective from Mitch Rouda and Joe Pulizzi, who both spoke at the conference.

I had the opportunity to talk to the attendees of the Niche Digital Media Conference in Minneapolis today — a group of about 150 niche publishers, largely rooted in print, who are looking for ways to efficiently and effectively extend their products online.

The conference is organized by Carl Landau, a long-time niche publisher who has recognized a gap in the market for targeted, hands-on insight and networking opportunities for these publishers.

This is the heart of the magazine business: magazine brands driven by an intense passion for the subject, by people who are as much part of the market as they are serving a market.

I used the platform as an opportunity to walk through the way that adapting a content-sharing approach leveraging social media tools can drive web traffic and market engagement.

The audience was attentive and interested, and when I wish I had been able to simultaneously simplify the topic and give even more hands-on guidance.

The summary is pretty simple: use Facebook, Twitter and a blogging platform to share lots of information with your audience over the course of a month and experience a quantum increase in your relevance and engagement.

But what I’ve discovered is that unless people actually get to see the process work, they find it hard to conceptualize. For many, each of the social media tools sounds esoteric and somehow marginal, and associating their brand, which they’ve worked so hard to impute economic value to, with these brands feels contradictory.

Afterwards, there were a few specific questions.

First, did we introduce a social media policy to the company when we invited everyone to get involved in social media? The answer is no, we didn’t. We let everyone know that they had a choice about whether or not to participate in our initiative. We rely on their common sense and understanding about how to behave to manage our social media identity. We’ve had a couple of instances where we’d had to ask people to take a post down, or to separate their personal social identity with their work social identity, but those have been relatively few.

Second, how do we convince editors that the content-sharing strategy won’t take away from the printed product. We all have our little tricks here — I compare shared content on social media networks with teaser ads for TV shows — but the bottom line is that the teams have to trust that increased engagement with their audience will enhance consumption of their magazine. I do have a bias that the real reason why some people raise this objection is either because they believe content sharing will be too much work or they are panicked by the exposure and pace of the new technology.

Lastly, one publisher asked, How will this make money? I can point to several instances in our markets where we’ve benefited from a client’s awareness of our social footprint. We’re currently working of creating commercial offers associated with the social media footprint, and I’ll report on those initiatives as we progress. I am convinced, however, that there is a tangible halo effect for our brands through their social media content sharing, and that will become more clear as we execute on this strategy.