Business Thought and Practice Met at Combi2010

The October 7-10 conference in Vantaa, Finland, hosted by Laurea University of Applied Sciences was successful and enjoyable. The official theme was “Partnering for the Future.” The emphasis was on innovation of all kinds; in economic development and environmental sustainability partnerships, in business models of all kinds, and in distance teaching and learning. The audience was diverse and fulfilled the promise of extensive participation of both practitioners and academics.

The emphasis on innovation was timely as evidenced by an editorial I read in the Financial Times enroute. Discussing the global economic malaise, it argued that monetary policy has used up many of its available tools. Fiscal policy is moribund; consider the strikes and protests in Europe as governments try to impose structural changes and the fact that the political system in the US doesn’t have a coherent thought about fiscal policy. The point was that we have to innovate ourselves out of the economic mess we’re in. A talk by Dr. Toshiyasu Ichioka of the EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation illustrated some of the possibilities.

Referred papers were presented in concurrent sessions, so it wasn’t possible to hear them all, but you can see the entire schedule here. I was particularly impressed with a paper entitled “Environmental Strategy and Organizational Capabilities: An Exploration of the Natural-Resource-Based View with a Focus on Columbian Firms” by Professors Mantilla and Rodriguez. It had a sound research design and good data that suggested a real difference between firms that include environmental sustainability as part of their strategy and those who do not. Innovative communication models were discussed in a session on “Multisensory Cultural Experiences” and another that featured faculty and doctoral students from the host institution, Laurea University of Applied Sciences. Read these and other papers in the Conference Proceedings.

It was a pleasure to hear an invited talk on customer co-creation of value by Professor Evert Gummesson, one of the originators of the services marketing discipline. I also particularly enjoyed a rousing call for “Stimulating Entrepreneurship and Creativity” from Professor Alan Barrell of Cambridge University.

As these few examples suggest, the conference was truly global in its scope. That is a major achievement and one that future conferences will hopefully be able to emulate. Next year’s conference will be hosted by HAMK University of Applied Sciences. Keep your eyes open; this conference is worth the time and effort!

Social Media Business Model - Lead Generation?

Every once in awhile I have an ‘ahha’ moment. That’s one of the fun aspects of working in an emerging discipline where we are still figuring things out. A few months ago it was the realization that we don’t need to use awareness—in the traditional media sense—as a social media objective. Why spend money on marketing research to measure creation of awareness when we can offer people reasons to act? Is it possible for a person to take action, even a simple click-through, without having some minimal level of awareness? I don’t see how. We can manage the results of behavior to take them a step further, perhaps following the steps of the traditional hierarchy of awareness, but we can use behavior to measure each step, not marketing research. Here’s one related post.

That line of thinking probably led to the ‘ah ha’ I had last week. Almost all social media marketing is the first step in a conversion process. There are several possible scenarios:
• Most marketers are not going to sell things directly on social networks, at least for some time to come. Threadless is one of the few successful businesses doing so. Others like Zappos use social media as an integral part of their online communications but sell from their website. That’s the typical model today.
• Whether you are using social media to drive people to websites or to retail stores, there is clearly a ‘next step’ behavior you want them to take. It is possible that you link to a product page on your website or to a retail coupon, and the ‘next step’ is taken immediately. If so, you have metrics, and you can track the referral back to the social media site. However, research shows this is often not the case; purchases are often not made as a result of a first visit to a website. That requires the marketer to build a complex tracking process to match a later purchase with first exposure. That is part of conversion marketing metrics.
• Social media is often part of a relationship building strategy. Getting people to friend our Facebook page or getting them to register for our enewsletter represent two good examples. There are all sorts of reasons why people may not purchase right away. There are an equal number of good reasons why marketers should be in touch while they move through the purchase cycle.

All except the immediate click-through and purchase represent the need for formal conversion marketing strategies. I don’t have any data, but my guess is that the second and third bullets represent the bulk of social media-initiated contacts with customers. The second scenario requires creating a conversion path through the website. The third requires a conversion strategy that’s based in a set of communications steps. Both are conversion marketing!

That begs a simple definition of conversion. Consider the possibilities. For the social marketer, “conversion” can be a referral from the social network to the website. For the online marketer it can be registering for brand communications. For the brand marketer it is likely to be the purchase. It’s a process, the traditional conversion funnel. Today there are even more marketing actors involved in the process. That’s complex from the perspective of the marketing organization. It has to be seamless from the perspective of the customer.

So does this statement make sense? Most social media marketing is the first step in converting someone from a spectator to a customer.

Social Shopping--Another Trend for 2010?

If I had added one more trend to Monday’s list, it would have been social shopping, so I decided to end the week with a summary. I’ve written a lot during the holiday shopping season about good uses of social media by retailers and results from the season confirm the importance of social media to ecommerce. According to Internet Retailer:

Another trend that emerged from the holiday season is the growing importance of online social networks, blogs and forums. Among consumers researching and buying holiday gifts online, 28% said social media influenced a purchase decision, compared with 11% who said they were guided by a customer-generated product review, 7% by an expert review and 6% by a Facebook message, comScore says. Observed comScore’s (chairman Gian) Fulgoni, “We are getting our first real glimpse at the impact social media will play on commerce as we enter the next decade.”


Earlier in the fall the site SheSpeaks asked about brand-related activities and found a lot of it on both social networks and Twitter. Other 2009 data from SheSpeaks found 55% of women they interviewed logging into social networks multiple times each day; 72% log in at least once a day. That’s huge!

The strategic use of social media by retailers is important, but the precise definition (if there is one!) of social shopping (or social commerce) is more narrow. It is an attempt to allow shoppers to bring onto the web some of the “social event” feeling of shopping in the mall with a friend. That may be an important part of the physical retail shopping experience that Internet retailers can provide on the web going forward.

As I’ve looked at the space, there are two basic ways to do that:

• Join one of the shopping sites that supports social experience. There are a lot of them and more being added. ThisNext is a good example of a site where a merchant can get a free tool that allows visitors to post a product to the site, where it joins the pool for online discussion. They have an application called Shopcast that encourages consumers to add ThisNext content widgets to their own personal pages. The common thread in this type of site is that retailers must encourage shoppers to list products on the site. Another set of sites appear to feature the products of partners; Couture Society is one of those.

Actually, it’s rather hard to find out precisely how retailers get products included; maybe that’s intentional, maybe it’s because the space is still new.

• Add social shopping functionality to your site. Clearly, this would be the more expensive option, but it gives retailers control. I wrote about Decision Step earlier in the year. BazaarVoice is another firm that offers a robust set of social applications. These, obviously, work on your own site and the merchant doesn’t have to rely on a third party site.

Be it social media in general, or social shopping in particular, interaction between shoppers seems to be the direction in which ecommerce is moving. Does it create a new type of business model, or is it just value-added to the existing ecommerce model? For now, I think it’s the latter, but that could change. It certainly is a part of Web 3.0 – the open ecosystem that is gradually replacing the walled-garden sites of the early Internet.

Internet marketers should keep an eye on what is going on in this space. It seems to offer merchants a way to reach out—often to the friends of friends (“birds of a feather”) who might also find the offering attractive. That’s cost-effective customer acquisition!

Are Lawyers Going Social?

I was aware of the website LegalZoom through its TV ads featuring celebrity attorney Robert Shapiro. That was all until a student pointed out their other online activities, which I found quite unusual for a legal firm—thanks, Fiesal!

The current centerpiece of the online strategy is a contest, just concluded, that allows customers to upload videos about their experience with LegalZoom. Here’s their YouTube video. The embed looks like nothing special, but play it all the way through—the 40 seconds is worth what you find at the end. When the video finishes you get thumbnails of customer videos that have been submitted. I don’t know how to do that, but it’s very cool and it makes the point that people are entering the contest.

That brings me to my favorite question: how did they let customers know about it. I’ll bet there were outbound communications, through their corporate newsletter probably. I have visited the site several times recently, and I didn’t see a notice about the contest. It has its own separate website, which links back to the corporate site, but I don’t find anything on the corporate site that links to the contest site, although entries to the contest have been closed for five days now, giving them enough time to remove a notice. Given the care with which they do other things, and the fact they are lawyers, I doubt that is an accident. That guess is supported by the fact that the winners are not scheduled to be announced until December 20—5 days from now. CPG sites would be hyping the winner announcement.

Ok, there is a separate website; you still have to get customers to that website. They have a very active Facebook page; I’d recommend it as a “best practices” business Facebook page. It’s active; there are a lot of informative links. They have only 1,197 fans at this point, but they used the Facebook page aggressively to promote the contest. The screen capture shows 2 posts announcing the contest. There were others throughout the contest. The last entry I saw was on December 7, promoting the last chance to vote on the contest.

They do something else I love. Each week they welcome “New Zoomers;” new fans, presumably. How nice is that??? They also had Halloween picture contests. Perhaps most important, their strategy jumps out of the Facebook page at you; you can see it on the website, but it’s not as evident. Their primary segment is small businesses and they are providing all sorts of content and encouragement to them. Definitely best practices! They are also active on Twitter; I’m guessing there’s a feed between the two, but I didn’t take time to trace the posts/Tweets. In addition, a search turns up a lot of PR activity surrounding the contest.

Finally, I can guess how they got the idea for the contest. According to the website of their interactive agency, they have been using client testimonials in their advertising for at least a year. That shows a clear, sensible evolution of online strategy.

It would be a great integrated program for any large corporation. For what’s essentially a website-only business model for services, it is striking. For a group of lawyers it is simply mind-blowing!

Inventing A Successful "New" Business Model

Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep a business going year-round in a resort area? I remember reading several years ago that the summer population of the town where I live is 20,000; it goes down to 5,000 for the winter months. If you consider that the peak season is no more than 10 weeks long, with “shoulders” on either side, you begin to understand the problem. Add to that the difficulty of finding housing for seasonal workers, and you have a prescription for small business woes.

Having emphasized with the businesses where I trade for a long time, I was intrigued with one I ran across recently. Two young women have invented a business model that allows them to solve the seasonality problem. The video is about two years old, so the statistics are out of date, but the energy and charm of these two entrepreneurs is much in evidence.



Megan Murphy and Catherine Bean have a single retail location in downtown Hyannis. That’s a high-visibility tourist destination and their store obviously does well in the spring, summer and fall months. Their website supports the retail store, but it does more. They close the shop from December to March, but they don’t cease operations; they just shift to the Internet. They stay fully occupied running online parties and fundraisers. When I
talked to Megan a few weeks ago, they were booked through Christmas. I checked the site and they are now booking for February and March 2010, so they continue to move right along.

How did they invent this business model—one which is different from the usual Bricks & Mortar? As stay at home Moms, they gave product parties in their homes, so moving parties online didn’t seem like too much of a stretch. They found a supportive marketing services supplier, and they were off. From a few email addresses collected in the store, they now have a list of over 20,000 that grows with every party.

What is the moral of this story? Give eparties? While I think virtual events have a great future, it’s more than that.

These two women used their own experience, their own background; they just moved their offline activities online. Think about your last online retail experience. Did the site “suggest” other items to you the minute you put something in your shopping cart? That’s what a good retail salesperson does, just moved online. That’s the moral—move successful offline marketing activities online.

There was a blog post last week by Mack Collier that got a lot of mileage on Twitter. I don’t disagree that we need fewer social media stars and more great social media ideas. My reaction was, “How do you know it’s really a great idea?” And then I thought about Megan and Catherine. Product parties had already worked for them in one context. They moved the same winning idea into another context, one where they could achieve even greater reach.

It’s a great example of not having to reinvent the wheel to develop a winning business model!

More Digital Oldies--This Time Kindle!

I had the conversation again yesterday. “I’m not really up on this stuff; isn’t it for younger people?” It reminded me of a recent article in Time magazine about the age of Kindle users. Guess what? They are on the older side! There are probably two reasons. The Kindle is expensive; $359 for the Kindle 2 and $489 for the larger screen Kindle DX. Second, they are used to read print content like books, newspapers, and magazines. Ad Age recently pointed out that “print is not aging well.” Ouch!

According to eMarketer (May 20, 2009), The device, first introduced in late 2007, accounted for approximately 10% of total North American book units sold in Q1 2009—or about 4 million out of the 38 million books sold. You can also subscribe to electronic content like blogs on the Kindle, all of which should make for happy reading.

But that’s not all. Amazon recently announced a Kindle app for the iPhone. It’s gotten mixed reviews, mostly because the screen of the iPhone is so much smaller than that of the Kindle. However, for those of those who don’t want to carry something larger, reading on the iPhone may present an attractive alternative.

In addition, there is also buzz about Amazon making a college version available with preloaded textbooks. As a textbook author (talk about a broken business model!), that’s long overdue. My Internet Marketing text is available with an e-book option bundled with the print text or as e-book alone. I don’t know what the sales breakdown is, but every time I ask a class I find that few, if any, of the students have activated the e-version. Why they prefer to carry around a print copy is beyond me. “Comfort level” is the best explanation I can think of because most of the things you can do with a print copy (highlighting, for example) is available on e-books. The other issue for college students has been the price of readers. Still, I’ve long felt that colleges had to make book readers the default distribution method for text books.

The iPhone app and the college version both suggest that the age of the readers of e-books could trend down over time. For all of us who believe in reading, that’s good news.

What does it mean about the future of “print” media? Will we consume traditional print content on our electronic readers? Probably. Will there be a way to monetize it? We haven’t found an effective way to do that on the web; why should it happen for electronic readers?

All this bodes well for content on the go, whatever your age. It doesn’t seem to offer strong hope for traditional print media, though. That’s still an industry in search of a savior—and I don’t think it’s a Kindle!

New Business Models for Local News

Many New Englanders were distressed to see the Boston Globe on the list of most endangered newspapers a couple of weeks ago. It’s a proud local institution, although it hasn’t been locally owned for a number of years. Other major urban areas share the angst of Bostonians, as their newspapers fail or are on the verge of failure. In an excellent article yesterday discussing issues across media types, Bob Garfield revised his “Chaos Scenario” description of the situation of mass media to “Apocalypse Now.” The mass media downturn of the past several years has been accelerated by the recession and has spurred the search for other models. Newspapers, in spite of their successful online operations, are especially threatened.

I wrote about one interesting experiment about a year and a half ago. BostonNow offered a hybrid print and online model that seemed to have promise. Unfortunately, its venture funding came from Iceland and it was one of the first casualties of the looming recession. Earlier this month Michael Learmonth described a number of local news experiments. All of those have one journalist assigned to the project but draw much of their news from local bloggers and journalism students. According to Learmonth’s article in Ad Age (subscription required) the New York Times has this type of local blog in suburbs including Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, New Jersey. Patch is a startup that has a series of local news blogs, also in New Jersey.

I've been watching the growth of online local news on Cape Cod. The traditional newspaper that covers the Cape is suffering along with its larger brethren. Gatehouse Media owns many of the local newspapers across Massachusetts. Their Wicked Local websites report on local news and have a heavy component of blogger content. Wicked Local Cape Cod Twitters each of its news items. I get the one from the Provincetown Banner on my Tweet Stream.

There’s another model here, one that is independent of print media. eCape is a series of online properties , with Cape Cod Today its local news site. CCT actively encourages people to create their own blogs on the site. I counted about thirty blogs on the active list (have posted in the last 7 days) and there are probably a hundred more that haven’t posted so recently. The editors do their Op-Ed columns on their own blog. Additional news items are submitted by local agencies and organizations.

My experience has been that it’s easy to start a blog on these sites. It’s less easy to integrate an existing blog into this type of site. BostonNow was trying to write a feed that would automate posting from outside blogs to their site, but to the best of my knowledge that never happened. Cape Cod Today makes it more straightforward, and maybe a little more controllable. If your blog lives on another platform, you have to repost to CCT.

Our wildlife center blog is celebrating its second-week anniversary on CCT today and we’re delighted with the visibility. They seem to like our content because we’re regularly making the home page, which is an editorial call, and being on the home page certainly affects visibility. (We're Wellfleet Audubon, down near the bottom. Posts move down and eventually drop the home page off as other posts are made. Each has it's own page where all its posts are displayed.) Our blog is a little over a year old and the content comes from naturalists, both staff and volunteer. Its primary aim is to keep in touch with our members. It has an average of just over 22 visitors per day although we can have spikes to 150+ when it is mentioned in our other publications or those of related organizations. On CCT our posts are generally getting 2-300 views, a total of 1.140 over the two weeks. For us, that’s a huge increase in visibility.

We also get comments on the CCT posts at a rate astronomically higher than we get on our own blog, so it’s an engaged audience. It’s local news, after all. These are things that affect us on a daily basis—we should be engaged! From the standpoint of the wildlife sanctuary it clearly says that we are reaching a new audience.

Does this represent the direction of local news? It seems to me that it is. Does that mean that the quality of local news is going to decline? Not necessarily. I see teachers, musicians, even a journalism professor in Boston writing blogs on CCT. Some people write about their area of professional expertise, some about their personal passions. Many of them write with skill and insight. And they are certainly close to their subject matter!

“Citizen journalism” has already changed the news forever; if you don’t believe me, watch a couple of hours of CNN or spend some time on their site. I hope that doesn’t mean that the profession of journalism will go into decline. We need the professionals. One future opportunity for them may be leading the march of the citizen journalists.

New business models like that of eCape are going to point the way!

A Brand-Driven, Viral Fundraising Business Model

One of my students introduced me to SocialVibe—thanks, Tao! It is another interesting business model—a combination of fundraising for non-profits and cause-related marketing for brands. As Tao pointed out, the focus on social networks also makes the efforts viral.

Leading brands have signed up as sponsors. Consumers who want to raise money for a cause (members) select their cause and create a widget (they call it a badge) using graphics supplied by the non-profit and the sponsor. The member then posts the badge on a social networking page and earns sponsor points by getting donations there. As the site points out, it’s a chance to do good without the member committing a lot of his or her own funds. For the brand, it’s impressions on the social networking sites that are probably a lot more effective than paid advertising impressions.

Some causes are seeing it as an especially effective way to reach certain target audiences. To Write Love on Her Arms is a teen suicide-prevention advocacy that is actively using the viral power of the site. But others are going beyond just the obvious teenage target audience. A Canadian publication talks about using sites like SocialVibe to get out messages that attempt to stem the tide of obesity and the related problem of Type 2 diabetes.

Another active user is Charity:Water, a non-profit with another “new media” business model of its own.

It is impressive and heartening to see non-profits making effective use of the Internet in their fundraising efforts. It is also impressive to see corporations and brands joining in these efforts in a way that is beneficial all the way around.

It’s a good thought for the holiday season!

Big Portals Open Up

While financial dominoes were falling over the weekend, two of the big portals announced major changes in the way they offer services to consumers, advertisers and developers. Neither is totally new news, but events over the weekend represented major steps in making the new strategies reality.

As early as October 2007, Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang made a post on the corporate blog that gave the broad objectives of his strategic review. He said Yahoo! intended to:

1. Become the starting point for the most consumers

2. Become the must-buy for advertisers

3. Deliver open, industry-leading platforms that attract the most publishers and developers

In April they announced Y!Open as the implementation of these strategic goals. According to PC Magazine, “YOS is a bold initiative to open all Yahoo sites, online services and Web applications to outside developers, and give users a "social profile" dashboard to unify and manage their Yahoo services.” This past weekend the project became very public when Yahoo invited 300 developers to Open Hack Day. According to Yahoo a “hack” is a little program, easily put together, that does something useful and fun. For example, one developer has developed an app that allows users to combine Flickr photos with the My Trips section of the Yahoo! Travel page. Since I had to look to find what My Trips actually was, it immediately occurs to me that this can be promotional for Yahoo’s lesser-known services. For more complex apps developers can use APIs like Yahoo’s BOSS, which lets sites construct their own specialized search services.

This graphic representation of the Y!Open concept comes from a video made at last week’s conference. Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh would like for you to think of the new Yahoo as an open, social, and very sticky platform. It looks quite comprehensive, including search, dynamic pages, mail, mobile and other. You can access the video from this page.

AOL’s strategy seems less comprehensive than Yahoo’s. They are allowing users to check other mail from their AOL page, and they explain how it works on their corporate blog. This is a step for the once-walled garden, but it’s not a major change in strategic direction. AOL does have APIs for developers. Some, like the one for MapQuest, are widely used, but they seem to be individual services, not a major opening of the AOL platform.

Both these strategic moves, especially coming so close together, are indicative of evolutionary growth in the Internet, all in the direction of Web 2.0. On one hand, it clearly indicates the continuing desire of the large portals to be the oft-visited gateways to the Internet for their users at the same time they offer an array of increasingly-social services that keep users on their own sites longer.

On the other hand, it offers huge opportunities to smaller sites and less technology-focused businesses to take advantage of leading-edge user services. Using the APIs of the tech powerhouses, they can develop their customized services at relatively low cost and have them hosted on the powerhouse site.

Google, Amazon and eBay are all major originators of this open platform strategy, making it a key part of their business model. Yahoo is making what appears to be a bold move to join them; AOL is moving although perhaps less boldly.

This all suggests a new type of business consolidation. It’s one that is not represented by mergers and acquisitions, but by shared services. Interesting and worth watching!

Cloud Computing - A New Model?

Cloud computing is one of those concepts that’s either very simple or very complex. Until you know which, it’s hard to understand the concept. I’ve been wrestling with that for several months and I’ve come up with a few nuggets of understanding that I’d like to share. Last week the AlwaysOn network posted a video from one of their conferences that’s helpful. The “chief geeks” of both NASDAQ and HP give their perspectives. Russ Daniels of HP points out that cloud computing can reduce operational costs, which his IT-manager customers obviously care deeply about. As a marketer I cared more about his follow-on statement that IT could then put more effort into creating value for customers. Think about that as you watch the video!

So cloud computing is a potentially valuable concept. What IS it? Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a retired IBMer who writes a tech blog that’s comprehensible to laypeople on the Always On Network. He’s a proponent of the cloud computing concept, seeming to see it as a logical extension of his work at IBM eservices. In a July 14 post he says:

I prefer to think of what is happening as the long-needed evolution of application software to something that is far more usable by humans. When virtualizing applications to be used by people who care nothing about computers or technology - as is mostly the case with Clouds - the key thing we want to virtualize or hide from the user is complexity.

In a more recent post he links to a page with 20 different—and all useful—definitions of the concept. That’s a strong indicator that the field is still evolving.

According to Gartner, the evolution is in its early stages. Actually, the interpretation of being near the top is their “hype cycle” is that sanity will soon return and the field will mature. Cloud computing is nearing the peak; note that Green IT is even closer. Translated, does that mean it’s a maturing, but not yet mature field? A field for IT managers to watch closely, but not necessarily ready for major investment.
Wladawsky-Berger likens cloud computing to other major management initiatives like Six Sigma and Lean Production. He says:

If cloud computing implies delivering high quality consumer and business services to your customers around the world over a variety of channels, as well as operating well engineered, efficient data centers - how can you stay in business and ignore this major marketplace strategy? It would be like an industrial company saying that all the advances in manufacturing and production over the last 25 years are not for them. It would be nearly impossible for a business to stay competitive with such an attitude. In fact, a number of enterprises have already been embracing cloud-like methodologies for delivering services to their customer, even if they don’t call it that.

The take-away? Cloud computing is a new model—an IT model, not a marketing one. Is it a new business model, allowing companies to outsource technical infrastructure (where have we heard that before?) and concentrate on their core business competencies? Maybe. It bears close tracking.

Applications like Amazon Web Services and Google Maps are examples of “computing in the clouds.” The Amazon cloud and the Google cloud, to be precise. They maintain the infrastructure, users take advantage of the functionality--as explained in yesterday’s post. Another example would be Facebook APIs. There are plenty of places to experiment without much risk or investment. Shouldn’t marketers be pushing those experiments—and doing so with the understanding there’s a greater implication than just a single application, important though it may be to their current marketing tactics?

DIY Advertising Takes Off

When I wrote about AdReady several weeks ago I set up an account to keep an eye on this interesting self-service display advertising concept. We’ve gotten used to this process with Google AdWords, and AdReady has services like a library of standard ads that make DIY banner advertising a reality. Following the model of AdWords, you can set your own advertising budget and monitor campaign results.
Because the system is easy to use, it’s easy to test competing ad messages. In their June newsletter, AdReady gave an example of running a test on an advertising button of its own. It’s a nice, clean test, with the only change being the call to action. I’d have guessed that “Click Here Now” was a fairly weak call to action, but personally, I’d have thought “Build it Now” would outperform “Get Started.” That’s why marketers should run tests! If you’d like a direct-response testing primer, please read the free testing chapter from Paul Berger’s and my direct marketing text. There is additional testing material in my Internet marketing text; I’ll do a post on that soon, because it’s an important tool.

So—with AdReady you can create your own ads and test versions. Now you can do it on the New York Times site. It seems like a no-brainer. Small advertisers are not worth the time of the advertising department, but, in the aggregate, they could provide another significant revenue stream. Why not give them self-service capabilities? Using the AdReady platform, that’s just what the NYT has done.

For publisher sites that need to add revenue streams—and who doesn’t—this is an interesting option. For sites that are free to the user, like AdReady and so many others, it has something interesting to say about monetizing the site.

That leads me directly to what I’m planning to write about tomorrow. Please stay tuned!

Best Practices B2B Site

I recently saw a mention of Mfg.com, and since I’m fascinated by B2B marketplace sites, I took a look. Founded in 2000, it seems to be profitable and recently obtained another round of venture funding. It is commonly described as an exchange for parts and components, but they describe their model as a proprietary platform that facilitates “the complex process of sourcing and selling manufacturing services”. They recently revamped their platform to make it easy for buyers and sellers to share CAD designs to speed the sourcing process, so they are clearly a sophisticated user of technology.


What I found was also a best practices site for B2B community building. They have numerous industry-based communities, a system of news feeds in which a member can subscribe in various ways including content channels and tags, and various blogs. They offer blogging to their members and have a company blog. When I investigated the profile of frequent poster aj, I met Mfg.com’s Director of Community Content. His profile page included his other blogs, his most-used tags, and other members with profiles similar to his. Great personalization and networking! They also recognize Top Contributors on the community home page, which is another nice touch.

The site says it helps customers:

Find content. The site is content-rich and uses tags as well as content channels (the site calls them “spaces”) to organize it. There are various search options. They have a sophisticated system of RSS feeds that allows people to subscribe in various ways including tags. They also have email notification, which seems more limited in scope. They are pushing RSS, which is interesting, given how full our email inboxes are these days.

Create content. Members are asked to create profiles. They can comment on blog posts, ask questions, and receive feedback. The other content creation mechanisms are wiki-based, allowing for various types of documents that can be shared with open or closed groups. The documents allow for many types of review and comparison.

Collaborate on content. Creating wiki-based documents on the site draws colleagues of the members (who then have to become members) to collaborate on documents. And since the site is content-rich, that offers the likelihood of the new member starting the cycle all over again.

Take a close look at those three steps—find, create, collaborate. That’s social media strategy in a nutshell. Content to draw people to the site, social connectivity to increase the usefulness of the content, and collaboration to allow members to work right on the site and bring others with them. When members are not on the site, RSS feeds remind them of the value it offers to them.

This is best practices in terms of strategy as well as execution!

Of Blog Spam and Twingley

The IAB Smart Brief (June 13) recently referenced an article on a new blog search engine with the improbable name of Twingly. I took a look at this Swedish site and found its content and business model interesting in several respects.

Of course I searched for this blog and was pleased to find it there. Not all posts were listed, so I pinged it to try to get the entire blog indexed and available for listing with their partner sites (one way they monetize), which are mostly content sites. So far so good! The link to the blog took me to the most recent post, which was fine. Then I clicked on the profile, expecting to find my own profile. Instead, I found a profile of the blog itself, which was interesting. There was some activity of which I wasn’t aware. That surprised me because I think I watch it carefully.

But I was most interested in the concept of spam-free blog search. This blog doesn’t show up when I search using the spam-free function, so I clearly have some more work to do. First, I needed to read up on blog spam. These are some of the basic types:

•Comment spam, in which a comment links to a totally unrelated, often malicious, site
•Comment spam flooding, in which a robot leaves so many spam comments that the server may crash
•Trackback spam, in which spammers take advantage of the trackback function which is supposed to report that another site has linked to your post
•Referral spam, in which spammer basically creates invalid links.

There are a variety of reasons for these activities, for example to get links thereby increasing visibility, to acquire visitors with the hope of capturing data or placing malware of some kind, or to increase traffic and therefore ad rates. There are probably others, but you get the idea. Wikipedia has an extensive discussion. A blog called The Spam Diaries deals exclusively with the topic of spam.

There are some important take-aways from this in addition to the attractive idea of finding out (on Twingly) that certain blogs are spam free. Just be a bit cautious because not all valid blogs are listed there. Active bloggers need to use the basic protections like CAPTCHA verification and moderation for comments. They also need to use common sense. I had several comments earlier in the year that purported to be offering advertising opportunities. A quick web search for the site from which it said it came (the relationship wasn't obvious) revealed that other bloggers though it was an attempt to place malware of some type. Flush that one!

If you’re thinking of starting a blog, the protections offered by the blogging platform are something you might want to consider. All the major platforms have their own blog and have discussed this subject extensively. My reading suggests that basic comment protection is much the same on all the platforms but they have different solutions for the more esoteric types of blog spam.

This all started with Twingley, which has an interesting business model. Not only do they offer content for sites that want feeds, they say they are developing “kick-ass products” based on the knowledge they acquire. So far they have the Twingley Blogstream widget, apparently the way they supply content to traditional media. They also have the Twingley Screensaver, which they say monitors the state of the blogosphere in real time.

A site to keep an eye on!

Local Media-Global and Close to Home

Borrell Associates recently released its 2008 survey of local media. The two largest shares go to pureplays (57%) and newspapers (25%). According to Borrell’s 2007 survey newspaper had a share of 40%, “but pure-play internet companies (Google, Yahoo!,Monster et al.) are hot on their heels, with 33.2 percent.” Right on both counts! I wonder if anyone anticipated the rapidity of the shift (download both 2008 and 2007 here).

It is happening globally, in case you have any doubt. Yesterday’s MarketingCharts featured a report from the World Association of Newspapers that shows a remarkable move to digital media. As I read the chart, it also shows a large increase in the time people are spending with media overall, which should bode well for an informed population. TV’s global share of advertising dollars is pretty stable, but newspaper’s continues to decline. According to the report, though, “Despite the slowdown of global print advertising spending, print remains the second most popular advertising medium, and by far claims the lion's share of spending over digital media” (download the executive summary here). For the time being anyway.


Put those data against a recent article in the WSJ (subscription required) about the struggling “hyperlocal” site LoudounExtra.com, a product of the Washington Post that focuses on a single Virginia county. I took a look at it, and have some observations.


It’s certainly focused. There’s a link to the Washington Post home page, but the content is exclusively from Loudoun county. And it’s pretty exclusively news—take a look at the main nav bar if you don’t have time to visit the site itself. All the articles in all the sections except Deals (where it doesn’t make sense) have a comment function. There are very few comments; that shows on the individual articles and on their “Most Commented” tab on the home page.

I took a look at the blogs page, because that seems the obvious place for a lot of interaction. There are many personal blogs about the local community linked here, but they don’t seem terribly active either.

The site seems to be doing all the right things—except maybe one. There are ads and listings but no ability to make comments about specific businesses or venues. For instance, on the Museums and Historic Sites you can submit a comment on that page, but I can’t find a way to submit a comment or to rate my visit to Mount Vernon, one of the sites listed. That seems to be one of the more popular activities on other local sites, and I can see why a newspaper site might not want to take a chance on offending advertisers. I also can’t find an opportunity to upload photos of my visit to Mount Vernon, and that’s another popular activity on local sites.

So not only is this site perhaps too focused on a specific local area, I’d suggest it’s too focused on news and not enough on user interaction. My sentiments only, but it’s an interesting hypothesis. For whatever reason, this doesn’t seem to be the business model as print newspapers work to expand their digital franchise.

Any other examples of local sites, successful or otherwise, and insights about the reasons?

Social Media Data--Free?

Social metrics service Sometrics launched in beta last fall and was opened to developers in March. The stated purpose was to allow developers to track the performance of their apps on selected social networks. The new firm received venture funding in May amid questions about the viability of their business model. This is what they said in an early press release:

The Sometrics analytics solution will always be free and we'll never share or make your data public without consent. As FB developers ourselves, we understand that privacy is a major concern. Therefore, Sometrics doesn't collect any personal data such as names, contact info, etc. and all aggregate metric data (gender, age, etc.) cannot be linked back to an individual.

The question about how they intend to monetize the service became clear today. They’ve launched an ad-serving network and say they hope to raise the CPMs from ads placed on social media sites. CPMs overall have been going down. PubMatic, another relatively new firm, provides free data—do we see a trend here?

The downward trend is pretty obvious. They add:

•On average, Web site monetization dropped by 23 percent from 49 cents in March to 38 cents in April.
•Among the verticals, Social Networking led the plunge with monetization dropping 47 percent, from 37 cents in March to 19 cents in April, below January lows of 22 cents. Entertainment monetization dropped 17 percent from 40 cents in March to 33 cents in April. Gaming and Sports were down marginally (4 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Technology remained relatively flat at 83 cents in April vs. 82 cents in March, but is still off January highs of 92 cents.
•In April 2008, 77 percent of Small Web sites garnered net publisher eCPMs from ad networks of under $1.00, compared with 95 percent of Medium Web sites and 100 percent of large web sites.
•Across all Web sites, the range of eCPMs was $0.002 to $18.45.

Their AdPriceIndex is free and looks as if it’s going to be worth watching. How do they do it? Their business is optimizing ads for publishers and they collect data from those activities to construct an index of ad network pricing. It’s not representative of all advertisers (the data presently comes from 3,000 publishers), but it’s instructive—and previously hard to find.

Back to Sometrics. Media Post says:

By virtue of its social hyper-targeting, Sometrics expects to be able to deliver CPMs of $1 to $2 for application-based ads, which typically command rates of 10 cents to 80 cents today. The company's system could also be used to serve premium and remnant display advertising on social networks.

Comparing that with the PubMatic stats, $1 to $2 would be highly attractive—if they can pull it off. Marketers have not been entirely satisfied with advertising forays on social networks (subscription required). An article in Ad Age earlier in the week says some high-profile campaigns on social network have total media spend approaching $25,000 per viewer film submission. That’s not advertising per se, but it’s a really high acquisition cost! In terms of CPM itself, a post on the Inside Facebook blog quotes reader/advertiser CPMs from over $4 (grain of salt) to 4 cents. The post drew interesting comments with more reader submitted CPMs. But you get the idea.

Several things are going on here:

Business models: New marketing services firms in this space are providing paid services and generating free data about the space, presumably with the full knowledge of their customers. Is that good for the growth of social media as a marketer communications channel? Assuming the data is valid, absolutely! Reliable data is one of the missing components in this space.

Cheap inventory on social networks: We’ve probably all read statements to that effect. These data appear to confirm that. They may also support the assertion that cheap inventory on social media sites is driving down CPMs across the web.

Ad targeting and tracking: Advertisers have been looking for opportunities that really work in social media and it seems evident that careful targeting is part of that equation. Tracking is essential to know what is working. What strikes me on several of these sites/posts is that they are talking about developers tracking the success of the apps they write for social sites. Where are marketers? These are our emerging channels; are marketers deeply involved in these programs? I hope so!

The beat goes on, with no end in sight to developments in the social media space. Data that helps us understand trends is welcome—especially when it’s free!

Have You Been Pingged?

I’ve been evited, but I’ve never been pingged. Presumably the name of this new site is a play on the technical term ping—clever!

Pingg came to my attention as the result of a story from DM News’ Sara Holoubek. It’s a good story that has an important marketing point. I was initially intrigued by the complete “party management” service she described, so I looked at the two sites and found a lot going on.


Evite has been around for awhile and according to the site has 18 million registered users. Evite has recently added the ability to send and receive invitations from your cell phone (assuming that you want to. . .). It also has a photo page to which you can upload pics of your parties, so they are clearly adding social networking apps.

Pingg is new, having been launched in March of this year. It is obviously designed with social networking in mind. It’s surroundSend functionality lets you get your invitation to the recipient, wherever he or she may be. The event management function provides all the basics and some cool Internet apps. The gift and charity registry allows you to embed your Amazon Wish List or to ask your guests to contribute to a charity instead. If you’re selling tickets to your event like Sara was, invitees can purchase their tickets with PayPal. If you are doing this for a worthy cause, you can show the fund-raising target on your personalized event page. Not only cool, but useful!

Back to Sara’s point. If your goal is to draw an audience, just putting something out there, even to your handpicked guest list may not be enough. “Searches and online transactions all originate within the physical world.” Right! And with all the clutter in both physical and cyber worlds, it usually takes more than one communications channel to get your marketing message to its target audience!

The News Media and Marketers

I have friends and colleagues who are bemused by the fact that a lot of people get most or all of their news from the Internet. I’m not because I’m one of those people. I read more “hard news” from traditional sources because they are fed to me by email and RSS. I supplement that with trusted Internet sources--some run by traditional media, many by trusted Internet publishers. I’m always tempted to add “even though I’m not part of the demographic,” but that assumes that only the young turn to the net for news. My conversations with Boomers suggest that many of them see the Internet as a major news source also. A Pew post from last week gives several more interesting references that support the argument.

Over the long weekend I stumbled onto an interesting report on the broader subject of changing journalism. The report by The Media Center of the American Press Institute is full of food for thought. It begins by saying , “In this report we describe a landscape in which citizens are increasingly informed – and inform each other – through means and relationships that disrupt journalism as it has been traditionally practiced.” There is an agenda; the report calls for a new journalism think tank/research center, but they make a cogent argument for a change that is dramatically affecting marketers. Unfortunately, the full report is 61 pages long; the shorter summary doesn’t deal with the issues most relevant to marketers. So here are some of my take-aways if the Walter Matthau imagery doesn’t completely convince you.

They call it We Media:

WE MEDIA: Audiences, not institutions, are shaping the future of news and information. The emerging ecosystem relies on a symbiotic relationship between traditional and new media. Civic, social and economic systems are set in motion. Standards of trust, influence and relevance are being redefined.(page 7)

It’s a complex ecosystem in which citizen journalists both compete with and provide sources to traditional media vehicles. See some great stores on pages 12 – 14. Did you remember that a blogger saw John Kerry’s plane take off, snapped the Kerry-Edwards sign with her cam phone, and posted it on her blog? She beat the Democratic committee announcement of the vice-presidential choice by 1 hour and traditional newspapers by 24 hours. I didn’t.

It has become a complex ecosystem with citizen journalists operating under different rules from traditional journalists and trust being a major issue for both (see the stories to refresh your memory). This graphic shows The Media Center’s view of the ecosystem (page 15). The image is pixilated in the original, but I can read Filtering of the News in the top quadrant and Conversation in the right. Maybe someone will fill the other two boxes in for us.

If you don’t have time to read anything else, I’d suggest the Convergence section on pages 21 – 28. It’s a thoughtful discussion of where the business models are/should be heading. They summarize by saying:

Unfortunately, the defensive strategies [reliance on the advertising-supported model] have yielded mostly narrow, and largely disappointing, results. Even the most successful online operations – those at The New York Times, Knight Ridder and Tribune companies – have generated revenues equivalent to less than 4 percent (and typically 2 percent or less) of total revenues at news companies. These meager revenues fail to replace losses of 15 percent or more in print classifieds and display advertising – advertising that has migrated to the Internet – in each of the past three years. Not only have online news operations failed to replace this lost business, they have failed to either create a growth strategy or to define news media in the visible future. Most of the $10.5 billion in online revenue generated in 2004 will go to the top 50 Internet sites such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and eBays. Only a handful of news sites – CNN.com, USAToday.com, New York Times.com, and MSNBC.com – crack that list, sharing less than $100 million in revenue, or a relative sliver of Yahoo’s $50 billion market cap.(page 28)


The lengthy ending section on the industry (page 52 on) is also relevant to marketers. This brief summary captures a great deal of it (page 4).

I recently quoted the statistics that suggest that advertising expenditures are not keeping up with the changing media habits of the consumer. This study puts a flesh on the bones of that argument.

Marketers must shift their efforts to the content channels where their customers are. And they must not rest on the comfortable assumption that it is only the young who rely on the Internet for most of their information. Two reasons; first, it’s not true of demographics up to, and increasingly including, Boomers. Second, the younger demographics—Gens X through Z, if you will—are going to get older, and they’re going to continue to rely on non-traditional, interactive, user-generated media. There will be ongoing change in specific channels, but the trend is inexorable and it's ongoing. The disruptive change we have seen so far is not over. Marketers need to be riding the wave, not fighting it!

Niche Social Networks for Professionals

It had to happen. Social networks are going professional. Not new news, you say? Most of us are on business/professional networks like LinkedIn. Others may participate in local interest groups formed on Meetup to talk about things from automobiles to pets to work and career.

But that’s not what I have in mind. One of my students recently pointed out that there’s a new network for physicians with an interesting business model. Sermo.com offers physicians a space where they can anonymously discuss clinical issues. It doesn’t charge them and it doesn’t accept advertising. According to the WSJonline:

Revenue comes from advertising or charging outside businesses access to data and member discussions. For example, Sermo Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., generally charges $100,000 to $150,000 a year to nonmedical businesses like hedge funds, which use it to research such things as how doctors feel about new drugs. They can monitor online discussions, with the doctors' names omitted, or see a tally of topics being discussed on the site -- like a new medical device or a controversial cancer treatment -- to determine what's rising or falling in popularity. That’s an interesting business model. I started looking around to see if there were similar networks for other professions besides the ones listed in the WSJ article. I found:
•The Lawyers Network, still in private beta. It offers connections via profiles, a directory of legal firms and legal content. It’s not clear what the revenue model is.
•Zolve Real Estate Network focuses on a global referral system. Membership is free. It charges a one-time fee of $40 for the first lead from the system that is closed.
•Student Dentist aptly identifies its target audience. It was built on the Ning platform, apparently by a dental student. If you look at the site you see a number of Facebook-like elements, including the ability to add it to your Facebook page or to get a Student Dentist badge (widget) for your website or page. This site has advertising.

I’m sure there are more, but this gives you the idea. People like to interact with others who have similar interests. When a network can professional development, contacts and content in a defined space, it has an opportunity to become attractive, even to busy professionals. There’s an NPR Talk of the Nation segment from last July that has several good perspectives on niche networks. The first 7 or 8 minutes is a particularly good introduction for the newcomer to social networks.

These professionals, however, are not likely to be willing to pay much, or perhaps anything at all for membership in a network. This appears to be a space in search of a workable revenue model that doesn’t include advertising. It will be interesting to watch it evolve—maybe to participate—maybe to build your own targeted social network!
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Is Media Convergence Really Happening?

This video from AlwaysOn discusses disruptive change in media and looks at where media business models may be going. The kind of convergence they are talking about is the increasing media and marketing integration between traditional and online media. Or you could simply describe it as “survival”—see the newspaper headline in Friday’s post!
View the video here.

The venture capitalists at the AlwaysOn network survey media industry leaders and what they found is not hugely new but backs up the contention that new media is on the move. It doesn’t illustrate the fact that old media is behind much of the growth in new media, but it (necessarily) is. News of venture funding for Glam and British network Adicon makes the connection.

With that in mind respondents to this survey forecast that the move to new media would continue unabated. They believe that neither advertisers nor their traditional agencies have a good grasp on how to take advantage of changes like social networking or how to get a satisfactory ROI on their expenditures in new media. Other posts on this site discuss the need for better mobile standards, but nonetheless respondents see the mobile web assuming greater prominence in the near future. See all the survey results here.

Convergence is one description of what is going on. It’s not hardware convergence—everything available on a single device. The variety of content has probably outgrown that type of convergence. But media are coming closer to a seamless ecosystem in which users can get the content of their choice on the device of their choice at the location of their choice. Is that the ultimate goal or a milestone on the way to an even more disruptive innovation?
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Is It Content or Context?

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to hear a talk by Lisa Gregorian, EVP of Worldwide Marketing at Warner Bros. Television Group. She spoke about “Making the Old New: Marketing Television in the Web Age.” She had a lot of fascinating things to say but ones that particularly impressed me included her emphasis on professionally-created video content and the dominance of the ad-supported business model. I spend a lot of time thinking about user-generated content, so that was a useful perspective for me. I was also intrigued by the ability of the content creators to tailor content to the needs of the narrowcast channels. Think The Closer for TNT.

The next morning when I opened my inbox there was a link to a presentation by Andrew Heyward, entitled “Content Isn’t King Anymore.” He is arguing that context is king in the world of consumer-controlled new media. View video here.

Heyward’s “rules of engagement” in the new media environment are worth considering. They are:
•Value — beyond relevant content to the ability to serve many needs, perform many related tasks
•Affinity -- a chance to connect with like-minded people
•Simplicity — “ask little, deliver a lot”
•Recognition — reward consumers for interacting with the brand
•“Working the web” -- by giving up some control to users.

What’s interesting is that the content creator and the advertising advisor are both talking about the same thing. Consumers want content in many forms, through many channels. Sticking with video we can distribute content over broadcast, cable, Internet or mobile media--each of which has hundreds, maybe thousands, of channels these days. Making the same content work across multiple channels is no small feat but it’s absolutely necessary. Even though you may be reaching a smaller niche market with targeted content, some of your targeted viewers still prefer to sit on the sofa and watch TV while some want to watch on their laptops from wherever they happen to be. And with mobile coming into its own as a medium of communication, it will only get more complicated.

The marketer has to react by understanding that consumers are receiving the content on demand—consumers’ timing not the marketers—and in the context—medium and channel--of their choice. That puts Heyward’s rules of engagement front and center. Marketers have to provide value and the other kinds of meaning he talks about whenever and wherever the consumer chooses to interact with the brand.

Interesting hypothesis—does that bring us back to a core value proposition that we communicate in various ways? In other words, does it focus us on marketing basics, including our customers, not just on clever uses of all media, old and new?
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