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.

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.

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

Over at Junta 42, Joe Pulizzi has put up a great post on how publishers leverage social media tools to grow their online footprint.  Recommended reading for everyone in the publishing business, as Joe has synthesized a number of different perspective and added his own unique and experiences point of view.

The key issue is defining your goals correctly and aligning your teams around those goal. Says Pulizzi:

If you believe that your core business is publishing, then you are competing with the entire world (we are all publishers today). As a publisher, you need to rethink your business (are you in the business of providing engaging experiences for your niche customers?).

In the post, Joe linked to one of my posts from last July where I laid out a model for content-sharing that we had begun to implement with our regional home design magazines.

We’ve been working this content-sharing approach for close to a year and it’s had measurable impact on our consumer engagement, market presence and revenue opportunities. In this post, I share some of the ways that our top editors have integrated content-sharing into their workflow.

For those who are interested, here’s Joe’s presentation:

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

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

Even 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.

The 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.

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.

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.

Congratulations to my friend and former colleague Doug Manoni, who was named CEO of Source Media this week.

Doug and I worked at Cowles Business Media through the better part of the 1990′s. At the end, Doug was my CFO.

He’s an interesting study for people who wonder about the future of business-to-business companies. Doug is a logical and sensible guy who understands that everything in the end comes down to cash: Who will pay you and who do you have to pay? He’s intellectually curious and enjoys interacting with new people. He doesn’t get overwhelmed by the things he doesn’t know and he’s grown more and more confident over the years in his own decisions.

This personality has helped Doug develop a bias towards extending diversifying his businesses to incorporate higher value content. He’s made this transition twice before from traditional advertising-based businesses successfully. I’m sure he’ll manage to do it again in this role.

[A note: the Chairman of Source, Marty Maleska, is member of the NCI board.]

10 doesn’t sound like a big number, but when you start looking back over a decade, 10 years of an ever-expanding and innovating world, 10 years feels huge and unwieldy.

At the beginning of this past decade (the first decade of the 21th Century…how cool!) I was working with an Internet company called Themestream, started by a group of engineers out of Netscape.  They had made up the core team that  built the Open Directory.  Their vision was to take the human-filtered experience of the Open Directory and put simple content tools in the hands of the people who had the energy and vision to create content. This was an early blogging and community model. We weren’t successful: too many parts of the web were still undeveloped, but foundation assumptions of that initiative, as envisioned by Bill Turpin and Rafhael Cedeno, were dead on.

Fast forward 10 years later and the world of media and marketing is still grappling with the issues of content and community in a digital, interactive world.

The thing is, we’re at an inflection point where everything is possible. The tools are easy and effective. Consumers are willing to use them. The underlying processes of doing commerce, building online inventory, managing databases, driving audience have all been refined and tested. The challenges we all face now are how to apply these tools in logical and simple ways in order to create business models that offer sensible pricing to consumers and allow for acceptable profit margins to creators.

I think it’s really exciting.

Impressions of a decade

When I sat down to jot down some themes for this post, I could see it getting out of control. The notes have lots of questions about what was the scale of the Internet in 1999 and 2009; who were the biggest Internet companies then and now; what were the biggest themes.

Here are some of the highlights:

• US internet usage doubled in the decade to something over 160 million users. Worldwide internet usage topped 1 billion users.
• AOL acquired Time-Warner in 2000 for $117 billion. AOL had 21 million subscribers in 1999. In 2009, Time Warner spun AOL to shareholders for a fraction of the 2000 value.
• Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. GeoCities closed in October 2009.
• In the 2000 Super Bowl, 17 Internet companies spent more than $20 million to advertise. This year? Go figure.
• At the end of the decade, a handful of companies had established what appear to be embedded positions in the infrastructure of the web. Google, Amazon and Facebook are the big three, covering information, commerce and community.

Are these companies likely to have the same positions at the end of the coming decade? The early history of the web teaches us that the ubiquity of access create few obstacles to consumer switching from one service to another. Market leaders have to sustain their positions through innovation, optimal service and an unerring focus on consumer benefits. Of the three big market footholds occupied by Google, Amazon and Facebook, the only one that can create value out of creating a highly transparent and efficient engagement with the consumer is Amazon. Google and Facebook rely on inefficiencies in the consumer experience to create value.

So, here are the notes that I made as I tried to organize my impressions of what happened and what lies ahead.

First, the decade of change.

The greatest change? Connectedness.

The Dispersion of Geekiness. Technological facility isn’t a pejorative any longer.

Fidelity. I think this phenomenon doesn’t gain enough attention. Media companies of that past controlled distribution in part because they had access to tools of production that created high-fidelity replications of content, whether it was music, video or photography. Today, everyone has access to easy-to-learn tools that allow them to create true fidelity: they perform into digital formats and are able to mix, clean, assemble and share high-quality content. This trend is only going to accelerate. As a result, distribution platforms are exploding: beneath the behemoths like YouTube there are all kinds of specialty platforms for sharing high-fidelity content. Today, you can build a simple blog and use multiple plug-ins to create an exceptional sharing platform. Media companies are going to have to demonstrate the ability to add value beyond production, replication and distribution.

Composition. The idea of what a composed media experience is has changed radically. A magazine, or a magazine article, is one artifact within a wide panoply of content types. A CD is the same. A song is the same. Consumers are changing the definition of composition, shifting it to include all kinds of types. Here’s a sample. In writing, there are standard artifacts: a short story, a novel, a poem, an epic poem, an essay, a review, a sketch. Writers who wanted to reach an audience needed to define their work within artifacts that were largely dictated by the production requirements of the media provider. Today, a writer can explore new modalities of composition, gather their own audience around their own content imperative. The publishing world can’t really replicate the unique experience. Want an example? Go look at Boing Boing. It’s all there.

The value of audience. All of the economics of media in the 20th century were embodied in the value of audience. It cost a certain amount to aggregate an audience in various media. That cost was passed along, with a markup, to advertisers or to content creators. The ability to amass audience and deliver content was at the core of creating economic value. That equation has been disrupted by the rapid shape-shifting of audience on the Internet. Google and Amazon are the exceptions over the past decade to a brutal lesson: Audience aggregation is ephemeral and doesn’t support long-term brand value on the web. I believe this was a transitional phase, and that we’re moving into a new ecosystem where the concept of audience will be replaced by a community of connections. [Not an original thought, by the way.]

What’s next?

Here’s what got scribbled down on the next page in the notebook.

Mobile. Mobile doesn’t just mean place-based. If you want to understand the next iteration of the interactive ecosystem, spend time with your iPhone. That’s the whole thing, all bundled up, right there. It is the first truly futuristic device of the Interactive revolution. Think about it. The guys on Star Trek couldn’t even have imagined what the iPhone does, how it works, how it becomes the operating system for your life. Mobile beens portable and interoperable. It means adaptable and intelligent. It means instantaneous and flexible. It’s a synthesis of all of the beneficial functionality that has been developed on the web over the past 20 years. Mobile is so big that it isn’t even its own thing: it’s the ultimate expression of everything.

OK. Get ready for this, because I wrote it down, but I’m not a 100% sure what it means, even though I’m a 100% sure it’s right.

Information/Entertainment/Content as the operating system.

This is the reverse engineering of the mobile experience onto the web. My iPhone interface, in its modularity and integration, is superior to anything that I’m able to accomplish with my laptop. The entire operating system is designed around the I/E/C paradigm, with an emphasis on easy functionality. The iPhone is the fastest adopted media platform in history. It’s lessons are more than Mobile; they are about what is necessary for ubiquitous consumer adoption.

Identity & Community. The trends that we see in social networks today are a point in time of a long-term evolution. These trends will continue to evolve because they satisfy a kind of use that all of us are looking for in our personal technology: How can it help me communicate easily across multiple shifting communities, without having to make radical changes in my behavior and while still managing my personal boundaries within the multiple groups.

Filtering. Get all this information and all these people connected in all these ways and the concept of filtering becomes more and more important. One of the most interesting developments of the past 12 months is how primitive Google has come to look. Google’s search is nowhere near as elegant or as filtered as the output of a well-developed social graph. We’re at the beginning of something large in filtering. How large? Imagine if I were able to search all of the content consumed by my social graph, with the different results coded against the different cohorts that I am connected with. I ask a question about media trends, and I first see the results of content that people in my social graph have accessed and consumed, possibly rated by them as well. The results are weighted by the frequency of my interaction with certain people. And then, when I look for an accountant in Fairfield County, CT, I see results that are filtered through another prism of my social graph. I would know that everything that I am looking at has been favorably interacted with by someone that I have a connection with. That’s an elegant filter.

And then, the last one:

The Quantum Theory of Content.

For companies to establish connections with consumers that can result in some economic benefit to both parties, the entire process of creating and distributing content will change. If you’ve read this far, you probably have read other things I’ve written, and you are familiar with some of the crude thinking I’ve done along these lines. Content needs to be conceived of on a molecular level, with the understanding that this content will combine and re-combine with other discrete content objects. The force that will drive this recombinant nature of content will be the interactive consumer. [This phenomenon includes marketing content as well.]

The content imperative of social media is the starting point for this re-envisioning. What it will look like in 10 years is anyone’s guess.

This isn’t the death knell of long-form content. It’s not the end of traditional media formats. It’s not the end of advertising and marketing.

However, if you want to be a relevant content brand in the next decade, you need to have direct connections with consumers — you need them to invite you into their social graph. The art will be in the kind of content that you share, the way that you share it and the degree to which the consumer feels that the sharing is open and conforms to their habits and needs. If you are able to do this, you’ll have the kind of access to consumers that will support your overarching business goals.

There you have: some impressions of what the themes of the next 10 years will be. I’m looking forward to sorting out practical applications for my businesses. I’m looking forward to being creative in this milieux. And, I’m especially looking forward to experiencing the vast realm of things that I didn’t see coming.

Have a Happy New Year.