Black Friday has been a retail shopping phenomenon, probably ever since shopping malls were invented. A few years ago, Cyber Monday joined the retail scene as an important online shopping day, although last year December 9 was actually the heaviest online shopping day of the year. This year, the lines seem to have blurred as the amount of online shopping continues to increase, stimulated by social media. Marketers are using social media to get shoppers revved up earlier, both in the stores and especially online.
I’ve written before about the importance of Twitter and Facebook to consumers who are looking for bargains. This year marketers took advantage of that to promote deals—sometimes on an hourly basis—on both days. The New York Times called it the "first Twitter Christmas” and has links to more examples of corporate marketing efforts. The Motley Fool has more.
Two examples:
• Penney is the one with the wake-up call—take your pick of a message from Cindy Crawford, Kimora Lee Simmons or Rascal Flatts. A wake-up call was needed; they started Tweeting special deals and coupons at 4 a.m. Black Friday morning. That’s good, but why do they have a Facebook link on their site but not a Twitter link? Worse, their Black Friday press release gave a twitter account link that doesn’t work. This annoying one does. http://twitter.com/JcPenney
• Best Buy has been pushing their TwelpForce since last summer, complete with television ads. I took a quick look around the blogosphere and there are some positive, some negative posts about its effectiveness, but Best Buy is clearly putting effort into it. It’s easy to find other customer service options from the Best Buy home page, but not TwelpForce.
Do you see a pattern here? The Twitter initiatives, especially for Christmas shopping, are important. Why are they so hard to find???
With apologies to an article I read over the Thanksgiving weekend and promptly lost, there’s a point beyond successfully integrating these social media efforts into the overall communications program. I’m not sure how Penney’s got the word out except for the zillions of Black Friday/Cyber Monday, coupons, and deals sites and blogs. Did they do some ads that included the Twitter deals? Perhaps; I didn’t see any. Best Buy used a significant amount of television to support the TwelpForce launch. These two firms are a small sample, but the skew is heavy in favor of Twitter and Facebook—non-paid media.
The article I read pointed out that newspapers stood to lose even more revenue as businesses come to understand effective uses of social media. Good for business, bad for newspapers. Today’s eMarketer newsletter quotes a study from The Center for Marketing Research at UMass Dartmouth that pointed out that “the Inc. 500, a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US, is outpacing the larger, more traditional companies in the Fortune 500 in many social media activities.” (“Social Media Marketers Declare Success” December 2, 2009)
Could that be the biggest impact of social media on retailing in the long term? As small businesses wake up to social media like Twitter they will be able to reach their customers-- directly and in a timely fashion--with relevant information. The impact could be huge. Again, bad for newspapers and perhaps other local media, but very, very good for small businesses – and for all organizations that want direct, authentic communication with their target audiences.
That said, remember that I wasn’t signed up for Twitter from either Best Buy or Penney. One reason is that they never asked. Retailers have to aggressively build their networks—opt-in email lists, Facebook Friends, Twitter Followers and maybe others. Then they can, indeed, reach customers with timely, relevant information—information customers have chosen to receive!
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Did You Get a Twitter Wake-Up Call?
Thursday, May 28, 2009
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!
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Content--Online and Offline
My interest in local news sites is well established. They seem to be the vibrant part of the news scene at present. In this context Walter Brooks of eCape pointed me toward a current article in Vanity Fair. It profiles Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. and chronicles his tenure as publisher at the New York Times. That alone is interesting and particularly relevant on the day the NYT released its quarterly earnings. The latter part of the article gets back to their lead-in—that a “doomsday clock” is ticking for the traditional newspaper industry and has a number of interesting strategic insights. They say:
American journalism is in a period of terror. The invention of the Internet has caused a fundamental shift not just in the platform for information—screen as opposed to paper—but in the way people seek information . . . Those who grew up using the Internet, which now includes a full generation of Americans, are expert browsers. It’s not that they have short attention spans. If anything, many of them are more sophisticated and better informed than their parents. They are certainly more independent. Instead of absorbing the news and opinion packaged expertly by professional journalists, they search out only the information they want, and are less and less likely to devote themselves to one primary site, in part because it is less efficient, and in part because not doing so is liberating. The Internet has disaggregated the news.
The article points out that it isn’t just a matter of putting traditional news online. They quote Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (page 6, Internet version) as saying that newspapers can’t consider all platforms as being equal. They must make strategic choices of platform and exploit the technology of each platform. That applies to all Internet publishers, not just newspapers, and it appears that many do not yet understand how profound that statement is.
The New Digital Content Marketing from Bob Collins on Vimeo.
Reading the article—and I’d encourage you to read all 8 pages, not just my brief quotes—I was struck by the similarity of theme in a video by Bob Collins of SHIFT Communications. The video is also long for an Internet video; it runs about 6 minutes. I think once you start it you will be captivated by the message of the expert commentary he has aggregated here.
Is it true that electronic content is the only content valued by many people, especially the Internet generations? That’s a scary thought to many businesses, especially traditional media.
But I think there’s another step for all of us. It’s not enough to simply make our content electronic. We have to make it visible. We have to distribute it (or announcements that it exists) widely around the net. Is that what inbound marketing is all about?
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
New Business Models for Local News
ocal Cape Cod Twitters each of its news items. I get the one from the Provincetown Banner on my Tweet Stream.
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!
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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!
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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!
Friday, February 22, 2008
The New Media Drumbeat Continues
Buzz throughout the industry yesterday was about the ANA/Forrester study that shows marketers increasingly skeptical about the impact of television advertising on their brands. What caught my eye was the top three headlines in Marketing Charts. Each is significant, but their presence, one after the other on a single day, was powerful.
According to Advertising Age:
Sixty-two percent of marketers believe traditional TV ads have become less effective during the last two years. Given that belief, it's no surprise that close to half of them already have experimented with other ad formats that work with digital video recorders or video-on-demand programs. And more than 50% of marketers reported that when half of all TV households use DVRs, they will cut spending on TV advertising by 12%.
Looking at the report on purchase influence by BIGresearch (available for download on their Top Line Findings page) we see clear evidence of continuing gains by new media over traditional between December 2006 and 2007.
In the electronics category:
•Instant messaging and blogging showed the greatest increase for all adults 18 and over. The increase in purchase influence was greatest among African-American adults and least among Hispanics.
•Broadcast TV and cable TV were the biggest losers. That was true across Caucasians and Hispanics with African Americans reporting the greatest decline in purchase influence from TV. Hispanics showed an inexplicably large decrease in decline of purchase influence from direct mail.
Ditto for media influence on car and truck purchases. The same pattern of decrease in the impact of television and increase in new media applies. Instant messaging and blogging are gaining influence among all 3 groups. Web radio shows a huge increase in impact among African-Americans, with video on cell phones showing a decrease among Caucasians. One assumes that the sample sizes were relatively small for both web radio and video on cell phones. Newspaper continues its slow but seemingly inexorable slide among all groups but actually showed an increase in influence on car and truck purchases among Hispanics and African-Americans. The third headline speaks to the growth of newspaper websites at the expense of their print parents.
The theme doesn’t change—new media continue their growth trajectory. The details are fascinating in the study that looks at ethnic groups, just as it is in studies that look at other segments.
The message for marketers is also unchanged but increasingly urgent. They must learn to reach consumers by new media, and there aren’t yet many rules of the road. Experimenting with better ways to reach your own target audiences is the only way to go.
Sphere: Related Content
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
A Sustainable Business Model?
Last week AdWeek featured an analyst report from Deutsche Bank that was positive on urban daily newspapers. Analyst Paul Ginocchio expects a return to profitability but not until 2012. Since newspapers have seemed to be an endangered species for the past several years, even that level of optimism caught my attention.
When I read it, I was even more intrigued. His prediction is based on outsourcing and continuing “to wring costs out of their operations.” Ginocchio wasn’t very sanguine about newspaper websites, pointing out that users spend just 41 minutes a month on newspaper sites.
A press release issued today by the Newspaper Association of America says that figure grew to 43 minutes per month in the 3rd quarter of 2007. They add that 59 million people, 37.1 percent of active Internet users, visited a newspaper site in that time frame, up from 56.9 in the 3rd quarter last year. Page views increased from 2.5 to 2.8.
Those stats are in line with the view that websites represent the future of newspapers, not print, no matter how many costs they wring out. But I’ll let others argue that if they wish. I’d like to report on a genuinely innovative newspaper business model that I ran across recently.
BostonNow debued in April 2007. It’s the brainchild of Russel Pergament, “a print guy” by his own admission. He’s also an expert on local print—the founder of the Brookline-Newton Tab and the founding publisher of Boston Metro. And he has a new hybrid business model in mind. He says that:
the marketplace has gotten ahead of the newspapers. All of them. That the arrival of our social media, coupled with the fragmentation of media and the personalization of media, has created something different, and the same old thing is not reaching people the way it used to. Hence our hope, our kind of struggle, to define with our reader[s’] input this new channel.
The print version, especially, represents a departure from the content of other local dailies, most of which consists of news bureau feeds. BostonNow employs real reporters and they do investigative reporting. Russel proudly shows articles like the rat one, many of which are later picked up by the two large dailies in Boston.
But it is the web version where the new model is being revealed. Looking at the top section of the home page, it’s not too different. You really begin to see the difference when you look below the fold. News items are tagged (there’s a tag cloud at the bottom of the page) and readers are invited to share their own articles post to a blog. BostonNow’s commitment to reader involvement shows clearly in their invitation to join the morning editorial conference.
Blogs are a key to reader involvement. The staff was smart enough to know that few members of the general public have their own blog, strange as that seems to many of us. But the person on the street doesn’t have a blog, hasn’t commented on a blog post and may barely know what they are. BostonNow’s Interactive Media Director Susan Kaup and her assistant visited libraries and neighborhood centers, teaching people to blog. That effort seems to have borne fruit.
Russel Pergament will tell you that the integrated business model is not yet clear in his own mind. He’s working it out with the help of his readers! That’s a real step forward for a hybrid print/Internet business model—one that may just prove to be sustainable, not only in terms of profit but also in terms of reader engagement and a valued role in the community.
Sphere: Related Content
