When news breaks that a traditional magazine company is looking to eliminate print and go all digital, the reflex assumption is that it’s a last ditch effort to keep a flagging franchise alive.

Take the report in yesterday’s Telegraph that Emap is looking at making some of its trade mags online only.

Editors from across the trade media and events business, which is jointly owned by Guardian Media Group and private equity group Apax, have been asked to examine “the best way of delivering content to users” between now and 2015, and to consider how they could reduce the frequency of print publications or phase them out altogether.

Is this a death sentence for the magazines that are told to cut back their print copies, or suspend them all together?

Not necessarily.  The article notes one Emap title that’s already made the change:

In 2010, Emap changed film industry magazine Screen International from a weekly to a monthly title, prompting a jump in profits and reader satisfaction.

Before you shake your head at the battering that traditional print takes, let’s spend a second celebrating the vibrancy of good brands.

I read this story on the web from a U.K. newspaper.  It’s primary journalism, sourced and cited, reporting on a development at an important company in its market.  When I saw that the story was from the Telegraph I assigned it more authenticity and credibility than I would have from another source.

Those are all attributes of the brand that were established over time, in the traditional world, and transferred into a digital world.

That’s a basic reason why we shouldn’t discount the efficacy of a brand shifting from print to digital.  As the article cites, readers experience a lot of satisfaction when they encounter a good digital content experience.

So what’s the problem, beyond the nervousness that those mired in traditional media experience when they contemplate a world without the processes they are familiar with?

The business model, or  lack thereof.

A decade or so of dis-intermediation, of booms and busts, of market re-invention, of unthinkable valuations, of technology usurping tradition, of automation, self-serve and free has cast a pall over the traditional ways of serving markets.  But what publishers are realizing, as they re-engage in conversations with marketers and look for ways to intersect with, educate and entertain readers, is that the combination of new technologies, consumer behavior and marketer demands has created a new foundation for building profitable targeted media businesses on digital platforms.

That those are common buzzwords I just rattled off doesn’t make the observation any less true.

When you combine a flexible content platform with a targeted and interactive digital distribution program, you are able to give marketers solutions that deliver high-quality connections and drive business results.  You can package solutions that enhance multiple elements of their marketing program, from brand advertising to lead generation to education to content marketing to web traffic.

A traditional print platform can’t offer the flexibility or breadth of the digital platform.

So, the examination that Emap has mandated isn’t a death knell, it’s an opportunity for a group of long-tenured brands to focus their resources on meeting their market where they can have the most impact: online.

Does that mean print is dead?

Not at all.  The printed product continues to offer high impact, engagement and value.  It just is the highest fixed-cost aspect of the integrated media model, and because of that needs to be able to justify its place in the media mix not just for the advertiser but for the publisher as well.

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.

An Emarketer analysis this week of two research studies concluded that social media was going to be a big focus on web marketing expansion by small businesses.

Our experience on the ground selling our DigitalSherpa service confirms the direction of the surveys.  Once we get into a discussion about how content marketing and digital networking can help their firm, local business people quickly move past questions about “why” to questions about “how?”

There’s a fundamental problem, though, that the research doesn’t get at.  Local businesses don’t have an interactive strategy that is geared to acquiring and converting qualified leads.

In most aspects of local business marketing, the lack of sophistication around leads acquisition and conversion isn’t that important.  But in internet marketing, it’s critical.

Take a look at the research first.  According to the “Third Annual FedEx Office Signs of the Times Small Business Survey” (that’s a mouthful), use of social media is the fastest growing tactic small business owners cite in their marketing planning.  The primary area of focus continues to be improving online presence, signaling that SMB owners consider this an area where improvement can is needed.

eMarketer then cites a Constant Contact study that shows that websites and e-mail marketing are the two most prevalent tactics or tools that SMB owners rely on to market their business.

The high penetration of Facebook makes for an attention-getting headline, but the nuts and bolts of the marketing program are in the website and continuing contact to the prospect and customer database.

The challenge is how these SMB owners are making decisions about the effectiveness of these tactics.

It doesn’t sound hard:  track web traffic, measure leads and conversions and then select the most efficient sources.

But making these kind of analytical decisions are challenges to the largest businesses in America.  Another recent survey concluded that the biggest obstacle to effective web tracking at larger companies was finding the talent to do the analytics.  If large companies can’t get to the answer, how can small companies expect to?

In traditional marketing campaigns, these kind of analytics were not as important.   A local marketing initiative drove the consumers to one of two places:  a phone number or a physical location.  At the other end of the interaction was a real person, who would ask questions, engage and impart information.  The interaction was more discursive and exploratory, and the experience of the person representing the business in adapting answers to the knowledge and personality of the person asking was critical to driving sales.

With web marketing a primary goal of the program is to drive a person to a web site where they can get information that will inspire them to either act directly or reach out for more information.

If that web site isn’t designed the right way, then you’re not going to get the return on your investment that you should expect.

One of the things that we’ve learned in our business is that creating a web site that can drive conversions is a science, not an art.  Like any science, it requires constant experimentation and adaptation.

The challenge facing SMB’s is not just putting focus on internet marketing; it’s figuring out how to find partners who have the knowledge, expertise and interest to help them participate in a science that challenges even the largest firms.

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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.

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.

I’m back from my week in the Bahama’s, which was relaxing and busy all at once. I posted some pictures early last week, and to get a feel for the experience you should read Tami’s post on her blog.

One of the big breaks was from producing content: between this blog and another blog I use for some other writing, I’m creating 15 or so pieces of content every week. When I took a break last week, I realized that is a fairly time-consuming sideline, and it was nice to let my mind stretch out and ruminate over things.

Here are four quick thoughts from my idle musing this week:

“Leads” is a term that is too loosely used and too loosely understood by media providers, lead generators and marketers. I’m watching the markets that I’m involved in get cluttered with misidentified leads. The result is troubling: a focus that should reduce cost and increase profits for marketers seems to be doing exactly the opposite. A “leads” arms race by the media partners will only clutter the market. My takeaway: I want to run a business that drives good leads and helps our customers make them better leads.

Media continues to be a powerful way to connect audience, information and merchants. The organic nature of media has changed, however. Media used to be associated with a format. Now, media is associated with an experience. Or something. What I do know is that media is more fluid and alive than ever.

The business cycle today reminds me of going to play basketball in a cold gym in the middle of the winter. Every ball was slick and flat. The secret was picking out the ball that was tight enough to have kept its air, and to keep dribbling with it until it warmed up and expanded. Voila, you had a ball that you could shoot and rebound. That’s the key: you can’t rebound a ball without air. In this business cycle, we can’t get discouraged that the ball feels flat…we’ve got to keep playing with it and warming it up.

And finally, experience is what differentiates products and services. Do you know what your experience is? Do you know what you want your experience to be? And do you know how to tell when your experience has gone sour? Those are questions I want to be able to answer.

So, I’m back to the blog. I did think to myself that I should scale back my posting schedule, but I suspect that is just a fleeting thought. I enjoy it too much.

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.

In 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.

Here’s a good example of how people are shifting the way they think about looking for information given the power of the social web.

The information about homes for sale is incredibly well-organized and ubiquitous.  Still, this story over the weekend from the Chicago Tribune offers a how-to for consumers to shift their search onto the social web.

A quote at the end from Carol Flammer, author of “Social Media for Home Builders,” captures the reason for the focus on social media.

“Nowadays, nearly all homebuilding starts with a Google
search, usually by area and price range, and those search results are
as likely to take you to a YouTube video or builder’s blog as to their
own Web site,” Flammer says. “Social media sites create more
opportunities for both sides – customers have more ways to find the
right builder, and builders have more opportunities to build
relationships with more customers than ever before.”

Note:  the article is primarily focus on the builder market, not the resale market.

The discussion about Facebook experienced a tipping point last week: third-party data confirmed what many observers had been suggesting, that Facebook exerts a powerful influence on how consumers are using the web.

Sheer scale is the first hurdle. Compete released data that showed Facebook outstripping Google in terms of web visits in January, a significant accomplishment.

Then, generating measurable activity across the web from that scale is the second hurdle.

SFGate, in an article using Compete! data, concluded that Facebook is driving more traffic to web sites than any other site. In fact, Facebook is the single biggest source of traffic to the web portals, like Google and Yahoo.

Using a snapshot of Web traffic from December, Compete’s director of online media and search, Jessica Ong, found that 15 percent of traffic to major Web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL came from Facebook and MySpace. The lion’s share of that traffic, 13 percent came from Facebook.

Google, which has profited handsomely from directing Web surfers to their destinations during the past decade, was third with 7 percent, just behind e-commerce site eBay, which had 7.61 percent. MySpace was fourth with just under 2 percent.

These two data points illustrates that a consumer’s internet experience has evolved from being self- directed to group-directed. Typing search terms into Google is becoming a secondary activity to following the map of the web that is being constantly updated by your social circle.

“People are spending less time navigating the Internet on their own and are now navigating the Internet based on their friends’ recommendations or their friends’ activities,” said Dave Yovanno, chief executive of Gigya Inc., a Palo Alto firm that offers social-media services. “That’s one of the big trends we started picking up on probably four or five months ago.”

One of the reasons that consumer behavior is shifting is because of the innate authenticity of their social circle. This experience of authenticity is increased the reliability of the information that people provide about themselves. The University of Texas at Austin recently released a study showing that profiles on social networks are generally very truthful.

“I was surprised by the findings, because the widely held assumption is that people are using their profiles to promote an enhanced impression of themselves,” study co-author Sam Gosling, a personality and social psychologist in the department of psychology at the University of Texas in Austin, said in a statement. “But these findings suggest that online social networks are not so much about providing a positive spin for the profile owners, but are instead just another medium for engaging in genuine social interactions.”

We’ve been talking about a new web paradigm. Clearly, it is here.