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.

I got this question in my in-box from a market rep the other day.

Hey Dan,
I am just trying to figure out here who is the enemy here.The recession or to much free media for the realtors ?
While other busineses are fighting the recession only, and will come back. We are fighting free platforms all over the place. What say you ??

Here’s my answer.

Charles,

I’m sorry for being so slow in getting back to you on this. I’ve been swamped and then lost track of the e-mail.  I apologize.

We’re fighting heavy headwinds and they are coming from multiple directions.  It’s frustrating.

The proliferation of free web listings makes it easier for agents/brokers to say that they don’t have to do any paid advertising.  That works for them when they aren’t making any real money from commissions.

But it doesn’t help them stand out.  It just gets the listings out there, into a bunch of different searchable database, just like every other listing in the market.

When I search the homes for sale in my home town, more than 100 are returned in just one price bracket.

How do I pick the agent?  What makes them stand out?  Do I want to spend all that time researching 100 homes?

There’s still a place for marketing solutions that help agents stand out so that they get more than their fair share of the business.  That’s what The Real Estate Book offers.

Our challenge today is that agents aren’t seeing their incomes rise.  So they don’t want to spend for high-visibility, quality advertising.  As a result, a lot of people are saying there’s no need for that kind of advertising.  Those people are being self-serving.

There’s a need.  There just isn’t enough business to justify it.

When the market turns, we’ll see our fortunes turn.  That will be a good thing.

Dan

The challenge is being able to wait through the downturn.

Of all the social media platforms, Twitter is the one that puzzles marketers the most. The typical observation is that they don’t get it and can’t figure out why it’s important.

EMarketer shared some research recently from ExactTarget that provides an easy answer: Twitter gives you a way to reach people who have loud and active voices online. Once you’ve gotten their attention around your message, you’ve got a good chance that they will redistribute that message somewhere on the web.

How’s that work? ExactTarget shows that the 26 million monthly users of Twitter are three to five times more likely to comment on blogs, post to forums, participate in view sites and blog themselves than the average Internet user.

“Consumers active on Twitter are clearly the most influential online,” said Morgan Stewart, principal at ExactTarget’s research and education group, in a statement. “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

The conclusions suggest that the time spent investing in an audience on Twitter is likely to have an exponential impact. This is the crux of social media marketing, and provides a simple justification for using a service that at first seems fragmented and chaotic.

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.

In the 455 posts since I launched ViralHousingFix on January 4, 2009, there hasn’t been a longer gap than the one between Post 454 and this post, number 455:  11 days.

The workbook I use for my professional notes is chock full from the past two weeks, and the program I store interesting snippets in has a long backlog, but there haven’t been any posts.

Being busy with a lot of exciting developments at NCI is part of the explanation.  Getting engaged in a personal writing project is another.  But there are a couple of other reasons for the fallow spell that I think might be interesting to those of you who follow this blog regularly.

The first is that I’ve stepped back for a bit to see how things are going to turn out.  Over the past 16 months, I’ve written and shared a lot of analysis of the economy and the housing market.  The two big questions were exactly what the composition of the recession was and what the beginning of the recovery would look like.

Right now, we’re in the recovery and it’s a choppy and uncertain time.  The macro trends have been positive, as a fairly random selection of charts picked from the blog Carpe Diem shows.  Our business at NCI is hyper-local and consumer-driven, and our experience is showing us that while the recovery has settled people’s nerves, it is neither expansive or extended enough to dramatically shift consumer sentiment to the degree that households are getting reformed and the consumer’s near term outlook is upbeat.

That sense of stasis has diminished my urgency to write about economic trends.  I don’t feel like there’s anyway to really project when consumers are going to have a baseline change in outlook.  It’s going to happen.  When it happens we’ll be happy about it, and a little surprised that we didn’t see it happening at the outset.

In a New York Times column, Jack Stack, CEO of SRC Holdings, Inc., summed up the current zeitgeist:

The funny thing is that despite their recent success, most of these folks seem reluctant to acknowledge that things have gotten better. Why? Well, I have two theories about that: one, people feel so burned by the last few years that they still fear a double dip — and they’re still waiting for another shoe to drop.

I think that’s a pretty good characterization.

A second reason for the dry spell on the blog is that I’ve been digging in on the learnings that we’ve developed around our DigitalSherpa social media marketing service over the past year.  It’s been pretty rich and exciting, and part of an overall organization audit and assessment that we’re doing across the service.

I haven’t written about the things I’ve learned because there’s a lot to synthesize:  the outcomes and experiences of more than 1000 client engagements.  We’ve essentially got thousands and thousands of proof points around the power of content marketing on social platforms, the relative value of different types of engagement, and the impact that a consistent content marketing plan has on search traffic and referrals.

Some of the facts are fun for their sheer scale.  For instance, we’ve generated more than 1 million social interactions for our clients in the multi-family space since launching CommunitySherpa last summer.  Some of the facts are engaging for their business impact:  one client has been able to cut more than $200,000 of search marketing spend because of the impact of the content marketing program that we’ve executed.  (That $200,000+ savings is net of the cost of the program, by the way.)

When you man a blog single-handedly, you’re going to experience ebbs and flows.  What you were writing about isn’t always what you are going to be writing about, and when you get to a juncture where you see a new avenue to explore, sometimes you just need to set back and sift through facts for a while.

The last three weeks have been partly busy and partly sifting time.  Thanks for your patience.  The one thing that has really impressed me is how strong the traffic to the blog has stayed.  That’s because of the way that all of you have used the content — the sharing, the commenting and the reading.  I appreciate it.

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.

Every marketer knows that the negative option is your friend: it increases response, renewals and profits.

As a result, the negative option can turn into a hiding place for the unscrupulous marketer. The technique can be deployed in a technically correct way, but can be so cynical about the energy and intelligence of the average consumer that it violates a basic trust of the pact between a consumer and a brand.

It’s discouraging to see Facebook slipping into the shadows of unscrupulous direct marketers, and its heartening to see Google, despite it’s position as the grand behemoth of the web, work to stay true to its core values of respect and goodness, as subjective and ultimately impossible to deliver on those values are.

First, a little detail on the negative option. A negative option require the consumer of a product to take an action to discontinue some feature or attribute of the product or service. One popular use of the negative option is when a service gets your agreement to charge your credit card automatically for the renewal of a service. I was reminded of the power of this option over the weekend when I saw two renewal charges hit my credit card for cloud software applications that I no longer use. Here’s a good definition of the practice.

Another example is when a function is installed in a software platform and you have the ability to shift to another option. The most commonly recognized example of this negative option is the installation of Microsoft Explorer with each install of Windows. Millions of dollars of lawyers fees and the injection of the Federal legal system created a higher degree of visibility for other browser options. The fact that Firefox can have such substantial market share is a testament to the power creating clarity around consumer choice can have in opening up markets.

As I shared last week, Facebook has dramatically evolved its definition of privacy over the past several years. Over the weekend, Dan Kaplan pointed me to a striking graphic that compares the approach to privacy at Facebook today to different points over the past several years ago.

The menus were lengthy, the options various, the language specific to the vernacular of Facebook and the process was confusing.

The entire system creates a disincentive to changing your privacy settings at the outset. The more likely outcome for a user is that they will go tackle the privacy settings once the horse is out of the barn and something has happened on their account that makes them angry, frightened, ashamed or embarrassed.

The approach is a far cry from where Facebook started, with an industrial design that was meant to replicate the insularity of social groups by keeping access to information directly within your privileged community.

Of course, Facebook can point to the high degree of control a consumer has over the service and say, That’s what we do. But that isn’t the starting point. The starting point is a much more open and sharing identity.

I was struck by a bit of research recently that canvassed 450 new Facebook users about how they used the system. They identified its benefits more along the line of a search engine than a social networking tool. That is a striking shift in product definition.

Of course, the value to Facebook of more openness, more search and more
databased information is that it creates the opportunity for more advertising activity. Therein lies a revenue strategy that can take advantage of the vast user base the service has created.

Google over the past year has attempted several similar expansions of it’s relationship with its users. The best example was the rollout of Google Buzz, which, we quickly discovered, was sharing activity with other people in our network without our explicit intent.

To Google’s credit, it quickly reworked the system so that we had to choose to share, rather than having a negative option that assumed we wanted to share.

The utility of buzz was diminished, but Google’s integrity reclaimed.

If you wonder why Google and Facebook have such different approaches to privacy, consumer-driven options and product design, the relative revenues of the two companies is a good starting point to unraveling the mystery.

Google has a vast pool of highly profitable revenue to protect. Anything that besmirches its brand and diminishes search traffic will have an immediate impact on their bottom line. Changing their approach to a service like Google Buzz is not just the right thing to do, it is the fiscally prudent thing to do.

Facebook doesn’t have that revenue model unlocked yet. As a result, trying things that will drive a higher revenue per user outcome is of the primary importance; in that matrix, it is unfortunately possible to loose the kind of laser focus on the consumer that ultimately drives the best experience.

Here’s what that focus looks like. In 2001, I sat in the Google offices and tried to sell Page and Brin a self-publishing tool that was a very early form of blogging software. A talented team of former Netscape engineers had developed the tool as part of a special-interest portal called Themestream. We weren’t able to get further funding for the service and were trying to unwind the assets and recover some of the investment for our backers, Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Venture and some individual Investors led by the late Mike Homer.

My pitch to Page and Brin was that the more content there was in the web, the more inventory they would have created. While they didn’t want to compete with the big media brands, our self-publishing tool would give them a platform for consumers to generate more content on the web.

This was early in their commercial evolution. Eventually, they would move into the development of tools and bring the Blogger platform into their fold. But Page articulated their basic premise with clarity and consistency. “We want to organize information for people to find. That’s our one purpose. We’ll work the revenue out around that purpose.”

He was a young guy. I was a seasoned executive. His approach could have seemed immature and inflexible. At the time though it seemed sensible, focused and inspired.

What is Facebook’s singular focus?

Harvard professor Mark Perry has been one observer who has consistently chronicled the silver lining in the recovery, sharing discrete pieces of data that show the economic engine gearing smartly back up.

Last Friday, he shared another in a series of posts that have looked at the recovery in local real estate markets. The subject of this post: Minneapolis.

I’m struck by the impact on the economic vitality of real estate agents. Commission income has bounced back to where it was in 2008. With fewer agents in the market, that should mean the opportunity for agents to boost earnings is significant.

Agents will play a big factor in the continued recovery of the resale home market: the more confident and upbeat they are, the more excited home buyers and sellers will be.