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?

What Do Consumers Want from Mobile?

A few weeks ago I made a post on a mobile service that caught the attention of Sachendra Yadav, a product manager in the Indian telecommunications industry. He posted a reply on his very interesting technology blog, “What I Want from My Mobile Social Network.” If you missed his comment and the link, it’s a formidable list that is well worth considering.

We all know that the US is well behind on the mobile curve and can look to mobile services in other countries for insight. Two recent studies are helpful.

Accenture uses Forrester data to point out that “there is currently a huge gap between what users would like to do on the mobile Internet and what they actually can do” (page 4; download the full study here). Sachendra is apparently not alone! Most respondents in the Forrester survey don’t find the mobile Internet very useful or easy to use.

Another 2008 study, this from the IBM Institute for Business Value, concentrates on strategy for MDMs (mobile device makers; download the full study here). In the process it gives some interesting data from a survey of about 700 consumers in the US, Japan, India, China and Germany. They didn’t include South Korea, another advanced mobile economy which should be watched. These consumers want many services from maps to games. The chart divides the services up between Utilities and Entertainment—interesting. Note that browsing the Internet sits squarely on IBM’s dividing line between the two. Note also that if you combine “very interested” and “somewhat interested” a majority of their respondents are interested in the services from maps, most desired, to mobile TV, desired by just over half the respondents. That represents a large opportunity for providers of both services and content.

It provides a widespread opportunity because these respondents are more interested in services than brand. They prefer a mobile device that “Lets me choose andconfigure which mobile Internet services I want to use” and continue to “be able to install additional applications and services as desired” (page 9). Lack of brand loyalty is also displayed. When asked about brand preference for the same set of services, a substantial majority chose “Would take up ANY brand as long as I find service valuable” for all the services listed in the second chart (page 11). However, these respondents also find the mobile Internet expensive, slow and generally inconvenient.

How to improve? Accenture recommends:

1.Innovate from the customer’s perspective
2.Own the customer experience
3.Serve the social needs of customers
4.Develop the ability to cater to individual needs
5.Look for value in aggregation

Both these studies stress the need for personalization and usability in the mobile experience. They also suggest that the mobile Internet has a long way to go before it provides these desirable features and becomes a staple in the lives of most of us. That’s even more true of the US, which is already behind but can use the experience of others to quickly move up the learning curve.

The importance of the customer perspective and customer experience also indicates that marketers need to take an active interest in mobile applications. A number of target audiences are already aware of what should be possible and eager to have those services. Others will join their ranks. It’s the job of marketers, whether they are services providers or users of mobile applications, to keep developments customer-focused, not technology-focused.

Are Social Media Metrics the Future?

I’ve long been an admirer of Tesco’s Clubcard CRM program. A student recently brought to my attention an article in British publication Marketing Week that makes a larger and more important point; thanks Alisa.

If you’re not familiar with the story the Tesco Clubcard started well over a decade ago. Under the guidance of the Dunnhumby agency Tesco has expanded its offerings from simple conveniences like paying your utility bills at the store (and later on the website) to a wide product portfolio with heavy emphasis on financial services. In 2006 the Financial Times said Clubcard had over 13 million members in over a dozen countries around the globe. Some have been members for many years—consider the wealth of data Tesco has about them! It uses the data to personalize communications and offers for a huge number of subsegments. The original focus was on their quarterly Clubcard mailing; their website is now an important focus of marketing activities. Much of the information about the early days of the Tesco/Dunnhumbycollaboration has now disappeared off the web into a book, which is well worth reading, even if the Marketing Week article suggests that this is the past of customer data; other approaches are the future.

According to author Alan Mitchell:

Take Google as one example. With Google, individuals volunteer information about what they are interested in buying, and when they are interested in buying it. This provides data that Clubcard can never capture: before-the-event information about what somebody is planning to buy rather than after-the-event information about what they have bought. In marketing terms, that's nirvana - and Google is just the start.
Facebook and MySpace are other examples: individuals building profiles about themselves - personal databases - on a mass scale, to reveal information about their attitudes, preferences, circumstances, lifestyles and interests. No traditional market research or transaction-based database could ever match these personal databases once they reach maturity.

That’s not an entirely new revelation, but he says it better than most. And it’s pretty scary when you stop to consider it. Tesco’s Clubcard is best practices marketing because few, if any, other marketers have been able to emulate the scope of the data they collect or the marketing finesse with which they use it.

If the customer intent data that can be mined from social media is the future of metrics—and there’s a strong argument that it is—then most marketers are far behind the curve in terms of customer data capture and use.

It also suggests an interesting strategic question. If a marketer is behind the CRM data curve, should he try to leapfrog into the area of social media, skipping traditional CRM altogether? I don’t think so. Each is a different kind of data; each has its own uses, even though intent data may eventually turn out to be more powerful. What do you think?
Sphere: Related Content

Are There Cultural Differences in Social Media Use?

Universal McCann recently released its Wave 3 study of Internet use trends in various countries around the globe. It should be required reading for all marketers. Here are their summaries of major findings

AdWeek headlined its report by saying that US users are laggards in social media creation. That’s what the stats say on the surface, but there are more fundamental issues that need to be probed. Remember the Forrester ladder on which a majority of US users were Inactives or Spectators when it came to social media? The issue is whether we’ll stay where we are or climb the ladder. I think at least some of us will move up into more active segments, but the UMC study suggests that there are major cultural differences.

The AdWeek report quotes UMC executives as follows:

"By and large, in the U.S. we're a country of voyeurs," said David Cohen, U.S. director of digital communications at Universal McCann, which conducted the study. "We love to watch and consume content created by others, but there's a fairly small group that are doing that creation -- unlike China, which is a country of creators."

Tom Smith, a research manager for the EMEA region at UM, said the gulf exists because blogs play a different role in the societies. In China, for instance, blogs tend to be about daily life rather than current affairs.

Why the differences? I’m not a China expert, but I do know that many families are separated by work requirements. The report finds that most blogging globally is about personal and family activities—your own family or your friends, and that fits the situation in China. The third largest blog content category globally is news and current affairs, and that has to be difficult in China.

I suggest that there are political differences as well as cultural differences that affect participation in and content development for all types of social media. Finally, there are platform differences across regions and countries. Is that the result of first-mover advantage in different countries or is it platforms that are better suited to conditions in individual areas? Marketers should ask.

Social media is truly a global phenomenon, but its use and development is going to be different in various markets. Marketers beware!

Personalization--Part 1.5 - Fantastic Example

Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.
Alisa Leadbetter is Crossmedia Manager for vdBJ/Communicatie Groep, a custom publisher in Holland. She is also an astute observer of the Internet scene there. She furnished the customization example I used in the discussion of personalization on the front end—in customer communications. She was kind enough to follow up with a link to the video that was the basis of the campaign and some commentary. You don’t have to speak Dutch to love the video!

View the video here to see how it's done.

She also provided a link to an article in a Dutch newspaper, and you do have to speak Dutch to read it. Fortunately, she added some commentary:

According to a Dutch newspaper this was the first of its kind in the world. The date on the article is February 2007. The guy in the movie is the leader of the SP, the Socialist party. He was one of the first people in Holland with a blog, they make great use of new media. His blog is mostly ghost written these days, but in the beginning he did most of it himself. They have had a few viral campaigns since this one (and of course they used the e-mail addresses they got in this first campaign for the subsequent campaigns). this was the first of its kind in the world. The date on the article is February 2007. The guy in the movie is the leader of the SP, the Socialist party. He was one of the first people in Holland with a blog, they make great use of new media. His blog is mostly ghost written these days, but in the beginning he did most of it himself. They have had a few viral campaigns since this one (and of course they used the e-mail addresses they got in this first campaign for the subsequent campaigns).

I reserve my right to consider relevant content, selected on the basis of customer knowledge, as the best kind of personalization. However, as far as personalized communications go, this is as good as it gets. People like to see their name in print and the creators of this program have done it in such a way that it’s almost guaranteed to go viral.

Are you old enough to remember the personalized Porsche campaign—probably in the late 80s/early 90s? It was a poster (paper; those were direct mail days) with a front view of a Porsche with the customer’s name on the license plate. I tried for a long time to get a copy of it. It went only to Porsche owners and none of them were about to give it up. I suspect some may still be hanging in dens or offices.

As I’ve already pointed out, database marketers learned to use personalization a couple of decades ago and there were the occasional, really creative uses like Porsche. However, in those days the best you could hope for was to reach your own mailing list and maybe a brief article in DM News or AdAge. Today, creative use of personalization goes viral. Consider the wonderful use of a video, a personalized message, and a viral campaign in the Dutch political example. That’s the power of the Internet!
Sphere: Related Content