Marketers are willing to look to their media partners for marketing services.  Is that something that media partners want?

In an effort to do a real-world reality test  of corporate buzzwords, Crain’s Media Business Magazine went out and asked a bunch of marketing heads whether they wanted the marketing services solutions that their media partners are going out aggressively to acquire or build.

The logic from the media company side is sensible.  Advertising spend has been down, the business is changing and their are broader opportunities to partner with their clients.

The challenge is in finding the right way to define this activity.

When a media company says that it provides marketing services, the danger is getting sucked in to low-margin, labor intensive activities.  The unique capability of a media company is to leverage content and marketing know-how to solve marketing problems, not building ads or writing SEO copy or managing e-mail programs.

What’s different today from the past is that digital technologies and changing consumer behavior has changed the core process of content creation, content delivery and distribution.  The lines between marketing and publishing have blurred.

What a media company can do that a traditional marketing agency can’t even begin to dream of is use their traditional skills, transported into the digital environment, to create seamless bridges between the digital footprint of their brand to their clients’.

That’s not providing a marketing service.  That’s extending the media platform to solve the problems of visibility, engagement and conversion for marketing partners.

That’s far from being a commodity solution.

The challenge is finding a simple and direct term to describe this service and to develop fairly standard and efficient ways of delivering the solutions.

I do.

The first time I got this question, I was surprised and took a second to answer.

Of course I write it, I thought. My name is on it.

When I asked people why they asked, they said that they loved the blog, but figured that I had other people writing under my direction. I was a CEO, after all.

The question prompted two thoughts.

First, we all have different styles of thinking and communicating. I write, so when I hit on something that I’m interested or puzzled about, my inclination is to try to get it down on paper and see whether it makes sense. I can go through my old files and find documents that I have written at different key moments in my career that laid out what I was seeing and how it sorted out.

This blog simply offers a platform to share some of those things. I write it because that’s what I do…write.

The second thought stems from that last point: a lot of people have things to say, but they aren’t people who write. There’s nothing wrong with that; we all have our different styles.

Those people who have things to say but aren’t people who write shouldn’t be left out of the power of using content and social media to communicate. And, people don’t expect them to be left out. When people asked me whether I wrote this blog or not, the question wasn’t pejorative. They don’t expect CEO’s to write, but they do expect them to have something to say.

Two years ago, when I began seriously exploring how businesses were using social media tools to market, I was struck by this basic inequity: the benefits of social media accrued to the people who could write, not necessarily the people who were the best at doing the work of their business. People who were facile with content and technology could stamp out daunting digital footprints, taking mindshare and traffic away from other, potentially more expert and more deserving businesses.

This was the problem we decided to try to solve when we launched the DigitalSherpa line of services: Can you make content marketing using social media tools accessible to local businesses? The purpose was to help level the playing field, to give people who had something to say but lacked the skills to say it a toolkit.

We’ve had some success and are learning along the way. I’m constantly struck, though, by people who look at businesses and say, If you don’t do social media yourself, then you’re not doing it the right way. That statement has an elitist and exclusive air. The real question that all of us should be trying to contribute solutions to is how to make the power of social media marketing available to any business, regardless of how good they are at writing and interacting and sharing.

Any small business looking at social media ultimately has to ask, What business benefit am I going to get from being active in this media? No matter how compelling the user statistics are, any commitment of time for a small business needs to be rewarded with results.

I thought it would be useful to share a detailed case study on how one small business has leveraged a content marketing and social networking strategy to drive measurable business results.

Situation:

TMG Brand Communications is a boutique public relations and marketing communications agency in New York City. Established in 1994, the agency has developed a particular expertise serving accounts in the financial services, lifestyle and media sectors. TMG is focused on creating broad-based communications programs that convey the distinctive attributes of brands and help drive business results. [Disclosure: The principal of TMG Brand Communications, Tami McCarthy, is my wife.]

The company’s purpose is summed up on its website.

The thrill of developing a brand’s personality, giving it a voice of authority in the market and having it resonate and drive a target audience to act or think differently inspires everything that we do at TMG Brand Communications.

Over the past several years, TMG has developed a suite of skills in internet and social media marketing. One of its most notable initiatives was the integration of social media with a live webcast to launch the Citi Forward card from client Citi Cards. (A description of the project from social media maven Mack Collier can be found here.)

Not surprisingly, TMG had not developed a plan to leverage its social media marketing expertise to elevate its own profile. Tami was an early adopter of social media platforms, with an active presence on Twitter and profiles on services like Facebook and LinkedIn, but had not developed an integrated strategy for using these tools to benefit the agency.

Like many of its peers, TMG did have an excellent web site which presented its capabilities and a sample of its work. However, the site was lightly trafficked. Most of the visitors came directly to the site, driven by TMG’s distribution of its URL on its business cards and stationary.

Tactics:

In the last quarter of 2009, TMG decided to develop an integrated strategy to use social media marketing to elevate its brand presence.

The strategy was designed to add a content marketing component to an already active social networking presence. In addition, the strategy linked personally-branded social networking activity on platforms like Twitter and Facebook with the digital identities of the overall agency.

In order to accomplish the strategy, TMG established a blog on a sub-domain of the tmg-media URL. This blog, buzzcloud.tmgpr.com, was set up using WordPress and the Cordobo Green Park theme. The agency also created a TMG Brand Communications fan page on Facebook, pointing the page to the primary TMG domain. The Networked Blogs application was used to distribute blog posts to the Facebook page, and a plug-in was used to distribute posts to Twitter.

A general content outline was developed in order to give focus to the blog posts. Tami is the sole author of the posts. The purpose of the posts is to share observations and suggestions about topical communications challenges. The content only peripherally touches on TMG clients. In addition, the content plan assumed that new posts would be created every two weeks or so, so that the burden of creating content didn’t weigh down an already highly-productive team.

Results:

Tami McCarthy’s BuzzCloud was launched in November 2009. Results for the subdomain buzzcloud.tmgpr.com were tracked separately from the results for the www.tmg-media.com domain so that the impact of the new content strategy could be accurately measured.

That impact was immediate.

In the six months following the launch of the blog, TMG increased web traffic to its TMGpr.com agency site and to its new blog, Buzzcloud, by 198%.

Hidden within this gain are a couple of data points that demonstrate the impact of a well-executed content marketing and social networking program.

• Visits to TMGpr.com, the agency site, increased 32% in the six-month period following the blog launch;
• Search engines drove 61% more traffic to the agency site in the six-month period;
• The number of keywords that drove traffic to TMG’s agency site gained from 425 to 1,178 in the six-month period.

After launching Buzzcloud, TMG became much more visible on search engines, particularly Google. TMG became visible because it began to publish original content with more frequency. Each of those blog posts were distributed into TMG’s digital footprint, and as people clicked through to the site, or redistributed the content their own digital footprint, TMG began to develop a broader network of digital breadcrumbs, all of which led Google and other search engines back to the TMGpr.com web site.

Increased web traffic to the agency site was not the only indirect benefit of the social media marketing program. The digital footprint of both TMGpr and Tami McCarthy expanded dramatically, generating increased brand heft and awareness.

The easiest way to assess the heft of a brand’s digital footprint is to type the name into Google. The phrases “TMGpr” and “Tami McCarthy” both return relevant results that dominate the first page of Google.

Most people who are interested in you or your company are likely to search for you on the web. A Google search that returns a page filled with relevant links creates an aura of credibility and authority for your brand. It isn’t enough for those links to exist, however; behind them there needs to be useful and relevant information, the kind of search outcome that is Google’s brand promise.

This program has not required an incredible amount of time to execute. The most time-consuming aspect is creating the original posts. Maintaining the social networking presence is a matter of intermittent focus; TMG uses Facebook and Twitter to share interesting content, give personal updates and re-distribute content that other people have created.

What’s fascinating about this case study is how important the creation of content has been to driving overall web traffic.

During the six-months ending November 2009. TMG executed its social networking program actively. It did not, however, have an active blog. As a result, the social networking had virtually no effect on the company’s web traffic.

Launching the blog and publishing content drove a tremendous amount of traffic.

One lesson is that social networking without content marketing will not drive clearly measurable results for your business.

Of course, the big question is whether this activity has any impact on your business results.

For TMG, social media marketing has helped to drive increased visibility, more business inquiries and ultimately more account. Go take a look at the agency’s blog to see just how much.

A couple of months ago, Adam Japko and I sat down with two of our top editors to discuss the impact of social media sharing on the traditional magazine editorial workflow.  The conversation was stimulating and I thought it would be useful to share some of my notes, since the observations from the meeting form a practical framework for implementing a content-sharing model within a traditional magazine team.  (For background on the content-sharing model, you can see this post from last year.)

Clint and Diane commented that the “sense of connectedness” was  different. Things are more interactive: they get comments and ideas from a community that is enormously positive.

As editors, they are seeing more and more overlaps among the ways that they distribute information, and are thinking about new ways to integrate things.

In order to continue to draw benefit from this social sharing activity, the editorial teams would benefit from increased access to the results that they are driving, both in terms of audience to specific posts and sections of the web site, as well as the relative value of this audience to any advertising customers.

In the future, the editorial and sales teams will also need to coordinate the amount of audience that needs to get driven into specific sections of the web site and towards specific customer groups, so that the potential number of conversions to client activity is lined up with the expectations of the clients.

Conclusion:

An editorial team needs to implement four steps in order to increase the consistency and effectiveness of their social media sharing program.

1. Assess and improve traditional planning and workflow:
   Many editorial teams can create incremental time by being more structured in their long-range planning and in creating their larger features with a longer lead time.
2. Set specific monthly goals for your social media content
   1. Feature magazine content in individual posts
   2. Guest bloggers
   3. Featured blogs and comments
   4. Online-only features
   5. Community engagement
   6. Traffic/audience
   7. Fans
3. Set up a weekly content plan
   1. Establish a social media content schedule
   2. Assign specific elements or days to individual staffers
   3. Communicate content schedule to entire team
   4. Have monthly meeting to review social media assignments and results
4. Track results & feedback

Sometimes it’s worth taking the long view: we can see just how far we’ve come in a relatively short period of time.

The first decade of the 21st Century marks a pivotal point in the modern technology revolution: digital information become portable, storable and easy to get. A world that had been defined by computing and software applications expanded to include uses that were considered to be futuristic fantasies just a few years before.

This graphic from Mashable tells the story of the iPod, the single most influential digital device of the past 20 years.

Yahoo! chief Carol Bartz made an interesting point about Google in an interview with the BBC today:

“Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search,” said Ms Bartz. “It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business. They’ve got to find other things to do.  Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting.”

People are going to focus on the bravado and positioning — after all Bartz needs to clearly define Yahoo’s value proposition in a market where the company is unfavorably compared with Google on an ongoing basis.

Search isn’t an infinitely expanding business opportunity. In fact, several dynamics at work suggest that the growth of search revenue will slow, limiting Google’s overall opportunity for growth. First, penetration of potential advertisers is higher today than it was two years ago for Google. And second, the shift of internet usage into social networks has incrementally changed the search behavior of web users.

Google’s media proposition is built on the back of search. That means that the audience that Google aggregates to the benefit of marketers — a basic definition of ad-supported media — relies to an outsized degree on search traffic.

Yahoo! has a more diverse media proposition. That’s the “half of our business” that Bart is referring to.

In this regard, Yahoo! is more like AOL than Google. Not surprisingly, AOL is facing its own challenges in terms of definition, value and opportunity.

The big issue here is that the largest diversified web media brands aren’t demonstrating the ability to grow revenues and hold on to consumers that suggest the franchises deserve premium growth valuations.

Yahoo! and AOL are predominantly content-driven media platforms that have created applications in order to enhance user engagement. That business model is an interactive evolution of the traditional media business model. In this regard, the companies are very different, and have very different challenges, from Google.

The primary challenge remains how to effectively keep content and applications fresh while managing a huge consumer audience, and how to make that base of content accessible and valuable to advertisers. The problem solving is discrete, because one approach doesn’t necessarily fit to every different content platform and user experience. (In this respect, the companies suffer in comparison to Google, which is incredibly simple to explain.)  An underlying question is whether focused media brands are more viable than diversified media brands.

When thinking about the strategic challenge of Yahoo! and AOL, I’d suggest that the most salient question is how these two platforms retain consumer interest and loyalty in an environment where Facebook is becoming a de facto operating internet operating system.

One of the Google searches that drives traffic to this site regularly is “Is Facebook the new AOL.”

The query could just as easily be, Is Facebook the new interactive media model? As an interactive media platform, Facebook is organizing and directing shared content, providing content publishing tools, generating scale audience with a high definition of individual interests and producing content within its own operating system seamlessly.

Facebook allows users to dictate what content is important and interesting.  That model is fundamentally different from the Yahoo!/AOL model.

Facebook can be an incredibly valuable tool for anyone trying to generate a business from content, and it could ultimately be a profound disintermediator for Yahoo! and AOL, which today look like legacy media brands on the web.

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Here’s a surprising bit of research: Consumers reduced the amount of time they spent consuming media during the recession, according to a Yankee Group survey reported on by eMarketer.

Media consumption dropped 17% from 2008 to less than 12 hours a day.
The one media exempt from the reduction was mobile.

Activities decreased almost across the board, with reading, music and radio, and TV and video dropping most dramatically. The only increase in time spent was with mobile phones. Talk time on mobile was up 12%, while average daily mobile Web use rose 36% to 11 minutes. Texting was also up, by 55%, to take up 27 minutes a day in 2009.

The survey speculates that consumer were too stressed by the recession to enjoy media. I’d venture that consumers just wanted a break from advertising. When you’re consuming at a breakneck pace, every ad has potential relevance to your actions. When you stop consumer, every ad is a reminder of what you can’t have.

Taking a break from advertising when you’re trying to cut back spending is like avoiding bars when you’re trying to stop smoking. The association between two actions — in this case, consuming media and purchasing products — is just too closely linked to keep temptation at bay.

Taking this speculation one step further, I wonder if we haven’t over-optimized media for purchasing. By this I mean that virtually no media experience is exempt from a commercial connection that attempts to bias and influence the consumer. This is the trade-off of free content…if you’re going to get the experience for nothing, then we’re going to design the experience to get you to buy things from our sponsor.

This underwriting tension has always been a part of the modern media landscape, but today the explosion of media distribution channels and the Anywhere Consumer has turned the stream of marketing messages into a constant barrage.

The recovering economy is driving bullish projections for online advertising. Two trends are apparent: the dollars will migrate toward the outlets with the largest and best performing audiences, and the trend towards leveraging social media tools in marketing continues to be a small portion of overall spend.

eMarketer has featured several research snippets and projections over the past couple of weeks that help support these observations.

Forecasts from leading market observers regarding online advertising growth are getting increasingly bullish, a recent roundup shows.

US online advertising proved at least somewhat recession-resistant in 2009, if not recession-proof. eMarketer estimated in December that spending on online ads dipped 4.6% last year to $22.4 billion and forecast a return to growth of 5.5% this year. Other firms have published projections in the past three months predicting that 2010 ad spending will increase more steeply.

The forecast from Citi Investment Research presented in the accompanying chart shows the strong growth in both search and display advertising projected for 2010. The biggest growing category continues to be digital video.

Within the overall online landscape, the top ad portals exert a disproportionate amount of influence. eMarketer’s research shows that the top four portals will account for more than 57% of all internet ad spending in 2010.

Google is by far the dominant player, driving more than 3 times the share and more than 2 times the average revenue per user than its closest competitor, Yahoo!.

The hegemony of the largest sites and the relatively fixed share of market for the top internet advertising outlets mask a developing shift in consumer behavior that portends continued strong growth for content marketing and social media marketing.

Consumers are becoming increasingly more likely to respond to advertising when it is accompanied by good content.

An ARANet Adfusion study shows that web users are significantly more likely to take action on an online ad when it is close to “online articles that include brand information” than when they see the ad as a sponsored search engine link.

“We’re seeing that article-based advertising rates highest with these important and discerning audiences,” said ARAnet president Scott Severson, in a statement. “Compared to other online advertising options, consumers prefer reading an article, evaluating it, and then deciding to click through for more information.”

Sponsored search links also appealed to younger and higher-income targets, with 23% of 25- to 34-year-olds saying they were very likely to act on such ads compared with 11% of respondents overall. Banner ads and e-mail offers appealed most to the 18-to-34 age group, as well as Hispanics and African-Americans.

This increased responsiveness — which should lead to increased sales — is the basic reason for companies to incorporate content into their marketing and advertising programs.

The tactical question is how to best distribute the content so that it will be encountered frequently by consumers, with an effective ad or response tool available at the same time. But it would be a mistake for companies to look at the overall projections for internet marketing and conclude that content marketing, and the viability of social media platforms, is a passing fad with no real value to the bottom line.

Last week my colleague Todd Dubner was at The Kelsey Group Marketplaces Conference talking about our DigitalSherpa service.

You can see his summary of his comments and some of the reactions on his blog Being Present. It’s an interesting read.

After about 9 months of selling, we have about 1000 clients to our DigitalSherpa services, so we’ve been learning a lot about what works, what doesn’t and how to communicate effectively with clients. We’ve taken our lumps and have had some remarkable success stories, all part of launching a brand new business.

Todd does a good job of describing our core premise with the service in this quote:

Here was the premise of the presentation was that local media has always been about high touch service at an affordable price. We can look at NCI’s history with The Real Estate Book to see that in action. In the early days we were not just a media provider, but truly a full-service provider. Our interaction with our customer often began with taking photos of a house, included production of a 4 color advertisement and concluded with printing and targeted distribution of a magazine – an awesome value, priced today at ~$400 a page.

Now we are offering a local social media marketing tool that is designed in the same light. Our customers recognize that there is likely to be value in establishing an active presence in Facebook and Twitter and understand that having a current, active, blog-like web presence is better than an old (dusty) static web page.

You can see Todd’s entire presentation below:

Edward Boches of Creativity Unbound asked some influential folks who went to SxSW what was their one big takeaway from the conference.

Kristina Halverson, CEO of Brain Traffic spoke to the readiness on the client side to make process changes that will enable content marketing strategies.

“My takeaway? Clients are ready to coordinate their currently siloed interactive marketing initiatives–social media, SEO, web and email communications, and so on—by creating a content strategy that defines and drives their content and its lifecycle processes. The larger implication is that organizations will need to reinvent themselves as publishers, creating new infrastructures to support the ongoing creation and care of relevant, quality content.”

Embedded in this well-crafted quote is a broad range of new skills and processes that are going to take a lot of work to establish within all kinds of organizations.

I was struck by this late last week as I met with one of our social media teams. This group is focused on implementing the social media applications platform that we’ve developed with our DigitalSherpa line of products.

My focus was to dig in on results: The actual results that were being delivered, the results that clients were able to define they wanted and the degree to which our dialogue with the clients was aligned.

As we spoke, it was clear that most of our clients had very little understanding of the broad impact that creating consistent, relevant digital content would have on their digital footprint and web activity. As a result, the client service focus was on activities that, in the grand scheme of things, were tangential to the ultimate benefits they would receive from the service.

This is a manageable disconnect, requiring us to focus more closely on education, training and innovative measurements. But it is a disconnect nonetheless.

Across all of our markets, I am seeing a increased focus on driving web-based business activity. But within that emphasis, I see very little understanding of how to create web footprints that are designed to convert activity in leads; of how to use social media tools to increase your content presence on the web; and to what degree social networking can be used to enhance your connection with those prospect, clients and business peers who are interested in being part of your social community.

The transition that Halverson sees coming is more than the addition of functional roles. To fully leverage a digital content strategy requires a seemless alignment of content focus across all parts of the marketing spectrum, and highly coordinated execution — including information sharing — between all of the different constituents who are managing the content, including the traditional advertising functions.

The marketers who do that the best will have creative and literate marketing leaders who are able to tell a story, let it acquire dimension and let it loose from the defined constraints of a brand. This is the stuff of folklore meshed into marketing, and the thought of that evolution is unsettling, no matter how oriented you are to the potential of social media tools