OnlineMarketerBlog.com

Share it on Twitter

Subscribe to OnlineMarketerBlog.com via email or RSS

Engagement Design and IDEA 2008

OnlineMarketer — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:03:37 +0000

Information architecture isn’t enough. Sure, it’s important - I gave some tips just two weeks ago - but it’s not the only organizing structure we need to consider.

That said, it may be confusing when I wholeheartedly recommend you attend the upcoming IDEA 2008 conference held by the Information Architecture Institute on October 7-8 in Chicago. The reason I suggest it is because they don’t just stop at information architecture - the conference examines the interaction and engagement that is possible in a web 2.0 world. (Note - This post is in no way sponsored by this or any other organization. It’s just me talking here.)

By the end of this post, I aim to convince you of the importance of the emerging engagement design, how companies can use it to grow business, how agencies will change in response, and finally persuade you to study engagement design at IDEA 2008 or elsewhere.

There’s No Marketing Funnel In Web 2.0

This blog is based on the idea that marketing is changing - rapidly and fundamentally. Forrester Research describes a key component:

“The marketing funnel is a broken metaphor that overlooks the complexity social media introduces into the buying process. As consumers’ trust in traditional media diminishes, marketers need a new approach. We propose a new metric, engagement, that includes four components: involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence.”

We need to look at information architecture and engagement design in exactly this way. Imagine that information architecture is the skeleton - very web 1.0 - organizing and presenting information in a way the webmaster believes is most beneficial.

Now, imagine engagement interaction as the body and soul in web 2.0. Instead of guessing what will most benefit her readers, webmasters can (must!) interact with her readers to determine how they use her website.

Businesses Engaging To Sell

Business is changing as well. In the report Use Personas To Design For Engagement, Forrester outlines three business who, with the help of their agencies, harnessed engagement interaction through the use of personas. These businesses found the key to interaction design through:

Analytics: QVC and Critical Mass rated website functions on their usefulness to particular users and designed the website around those highly-rated features.
Usability: Thornburg Mortgage and Enlighten ensured that their new website features truly served their current and potential customers.
Advocacy: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and WHITTMANHART provided supporters with a website that kept them more involved as well as facilitated their donations.

In all three cases, harnessing engagement design resulted in huge increases in business.

Agencies Need To Change Too

As IDEA 2008 speaker and engagement savant David Armano described in this video, the roles in your marketing agency need to change to accommodate this shift in business. David claims that engagement design exists as the design of behavior with three elements: human, technical, aesthetic.

Of course, this requires a very different agency layout with IT sitting over in the corner, the writers up in the loft, and the designers on another floor altogether. Formerly siloed roles are becoming both more blurry and moving closer together. Creative departmental overlap will be key as we move to a user-focused model.

Forget the days of the “star” designer. As Malcolm Gladwell describes in The Talent Myth, “the organizations that are most successful at [coordinating efforts of many different people] are the ones where the system is the star.”

It’s a wildly exciting time. Again from David: “Marketing, design and ‘branding’ are on a violent collision course as communications, experience and messaging become indistigusible [sic] to the average customer/user.”

So Who Cares?

Well, hopefully you. Readers of this blog are usually keenly attuned to marketing, advertising, PR, and social media. And it is this world that is changing.

Events like IDEA 2008 are essential for hearing from the best minds in the business and plotting out how your business or agency can flourish in a web 2.0 world. My boss recently sent me to an IA conference run by Adaptive Path and I found it immensely useful.

I’m not sure if I’ll be going to IDEA 2008 myself (sponsor now being accepted!), but I encourage you to attend. Like I mentioned, this blog is all about the changing world of business and marketing. Hearing from the best minds in the business can only help you.

Watch this blog for updated about my attendance. If I do go, I will do my best to live blog and tweet while there. Until then, think about how your organization can harness engagement design. I promise that your customers and supporters will thank you for it.

If you liked this post, feel free to show some love:

Share it on Twitter

Subscribe to OnlineMarketerBlog.com via email or RSS

Nothing Funny About A Good Online Video Business Model

OnlineMarketer — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:51:05 +0000

Courtesy of gapingvoid

In their new September issue, Fast Company magazine features a fascinating story about the comedy web video business and how it’s almost impossible to make these websites profitable.

They lay out many of the current business models, but I think an addendum is useful. In this post, I will outline a mindset that hurts that industry, what the current business model is and why it doesn’t work, a suggestion to ensure profitability, and the business model that can make an online video site profitable.

First, The Mindset

We tend to think about web videos as a “thing.” It is a product. It is content.

Forget this mindset. If you’re a video producer, web video might be a tangible thing that comes from tangible people sitting around your tangible office. But it’s not.

For your audience, web video is an experience. There’s no actual product for the viewer - the video elevates the spirits or gives us hope or connects us to others. It has more in common with a trip to Disneyland than it does with buying razor blades.

So stop thinking of a video as a commodity and start thinking of it as an experience you provide for your viewer.

Second, The Model

As the Fast Company article points out, the prevailing business model is advertiser-based. This has been the case for most things in the U.S. for more than half a century.

However, the advertiser business model cannot support web video. Consider it: the marketplace is fragmented, niche sites have the most loyal visitors, online is still new to many advertisers, audience has a decreased appetite for ads, and the content (at least on the comedy sites) is oftentimes…edgy, to put it diplomatically.

Even off-shoots of the advertiser model don’t work, such as product placement and sponsored shows. The huge conglomerates that have the money to invest in these small comedy sites only know these sorts of models - give the product away in exchange for some advertiser time.

No matter how many times you throw money at the problem, this business model still doesn’t work.

But that doesn’t mean web videos will never be profitable. (Misters Murdoch and Branson, please have your assistants print out the following explanation.)

One Suggestion

First, just a suggestion: keep the suits as far away from the video production as possible. Nothing kills comedy like business people.

You want to appeal to college kids? Hire college kids or recent grads to do the show. Fast Company points out the CollegeHumor.com, a site still operated by the creators, plays well with YouTube and still cleans up at the bank.

“The site has attracted advertisers such as Motorola, Fox, and Subaru and reaped $4.2 million in ad revenue during the first quarter of the year. CollegeHumor is profitable - the only profitable major comedy-video site.”

You do what you’re good at and hire people to do what they’re good at. (This applies to most businesses, not just online video, by the way.)

One Solution

OK, you’ve been waiting for that business model that will work better than advertising, right? This is how major media companies can succeed with online video.

Here it is, step by step, just for you titans of business:

Take all the money you would spend on focus groups and market research.
Invest this money into your online video business.
(Once the site is up, collect the bits of ad revenue and re-invest it.)
Use the website to do all the market research you would have done for your other shows.

Web video sites can be profitable when the “product” is not the web video. Websites are the perfect venue for market research. You can find out anything you want - people are dying to share their opinion for free!

Can’t decide between jokes for a sitcom? Film them both and let the website audience vote. Feature pilot shows on your website and only air the most popular ones. The money you save from traditional research and focus groups (much less money lost in terrible shows you would have aired), will more than pay for your video website.

Eventually the website might make money and that’s fabulous. Until then, use it as a seed bed. Test out new acts, try out new jokes, ask your audience’s opinion, and gauge their interests. Web video sites can have immense value if they are viewed as research laboratories instead of content production facilities.

But what do you think? Maybe advertising just isn’t being done correctly for these online comedy sites to become profitable? Maybe a subscription model like The Bitterest Pill podcast would work? Let me know what you think in the comments section below.

If you liked this post, feel free to show some love:

Share it on Twitter

Subscribe to OnlineMarketerBlog.com via email or RSS

Journalism At The Crossroads - To Evolve Or Not

OnlineMarketer — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:56:02 +0000

Courtesy of jbhill via Flickr

Journalism is at a crossroads, with two distinct groups voicing their opinions.

On one side, many journalists don’t buy the trend toward social media and have their heads firmly entrenched in the sand. They believe in their readership’s loyalty and claim that social media is a passing fad.

One the other side, other journalists have fully embraced the social media tools at their disposal and go so far as to trumpet the death of journalism. They expect newspapers to close up shop; the death knell of print news is a symphony of tweets.

Aren’t the two views mutually exclusive? Which one is correct?

Personally, I believe they are both wrong. Some newspapers will outlast social media and some have already been taken down by it. The basic truth is that some people love getting their news from social media like Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed, while others will never replace their tangible newspaper-with-coffee routine.

This post will explain, however, that newspapers and journalists who use social media - in effect integrate these two seemingly opposing ideas - will likely be the long-term winners. There is no doubt that the old ways are changing. Journalists who refuse to accept that should begin cleaning up their resumes.

But major news networks need not shutter the windows quite yet. Embracing this change could be the key to stopping the newspaper industry’s slow (and recently not so slow) slide into irrelevance.

An Industry In Turmoil

You don’t have to look far for evidence that the newspaper industry is in trouble, and this has been a trend for several years. The New York Times reported that 2006 saw one of the steepest declines in the newspaper industry ever. In 2007, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported a continued 3% decline across the board. This pattern involves not only newspaper sales, but the related topics of ad sales and job cuts.

So where have all the readers gone? You guess it - the internet. The NYT title says it all: “More Readers Trading Newspapers For Web Sites.” Or how about “Newspaper Circulation In Steep Slide Across Nation.” Get the picture?

A (Social) World Of Solutions

So, in these tough times, what if there was a way for newspapers to:

Create a sense of loyalty to a particular magazine
Develop brand advocates (word of mouth ambassadors)
Provide more relevant news
Link into a network of concerned citizens
Increase pageviews and (connected to increased traffic) increase revenue

A recent article by Todd Andrlik about The Chicago Tribune’s recent forays into the social media space illustrates a newspaper who has done just that. Here’s a quick run-down of the results of their efforts:

Traffic: Social media efforts are responsible for an 8% increase in pageviews.
Market research: “‘Essentially, social media gives us a year-round, real-time focus group to monitor conversations and keep us in tune with what consumers are thinking,’ said Bill Adee, associate managing editor for innovation and head of the Tribune’s social media task force.”
More relevant content: The Tribune created a special section on the website about Chicago’s O’Hare airport directly based on the conversation they heard on Twitter.
A network of citizen journalists: The newspaper recently broke a story about a bomb scare at the Daley Building after being tipped off my concerned followers on Twitter.
Positive local and national PR: Serving as a example (and occasionally picking up the tab at tweet-ups) has the tangential benefit of blog posts just like this one and hundreds more online.

Flash In The Pan Or Gem Of A Strategy?

Maybe the successful efforts are a momentary success. After all, despite the success found through social media, I’m sure things are still tight over at The Tribune.

And yet, more and more smart people are figuring out that social media enhances the journalistic work they do. For instance, marketer and author Peter Shankman’s “Help A Reporter Out” connects journalists with possible sources. Formerly journalists had to pay for such a service, but Shankman does it all for free. He gets notoriety out of the deal and a little advertising, but the more than 20,000 subscribers seem to think it’s worthwhile.

Likewise, MyCreativeTeam introduced a wiki list of journalists who use Twitter to connect PR people with journalists and media outlets. The list has grown exponentially since it first began and you can read more about it here.

One can only assume that the hundreds or thousands of journalists using these services are getting something out of them. Staying connected, developing sources, staying in touch with your community readership, providing more value - don’t these sound like smart business goals for newspapers and the journalists who run them?

Final Assessment

Frankly, I don’t think newspaper will go away entirely. It’s difficult to imagine a Norman Rockwell-esque scene in which Father Dearest whips out his blackberry to connect to the Twitter stream rather than reading his paper by the fire.

However, the journalists and newspapers who deny the use of social media - for themselves or their audience - might as well have targets painted on their backs. Your days are numbered.

But, if you take the route of The Chicago Tribune, Shankman’s HARO, and MyCreativeTeam’s journalist Twitter wiki, you may reap rewards you never expected. Experiment, have fun, but also measure the results again your business goals and reassess accordingly. Journalists should not - heck, cannot - avoid social media. But if they get wise to the tool, it may become one of their greatest assets.

If you liked this post, feel free to show some love:

Share it on Twitter

Subscribe to OnlineMarketerBlog.com via email or RSS

5 Ways To Succeed On StumbleUpon

OnlineMarketer — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:31:08 +0000

Let’s talk blog promotion.

I was really glad when Chris Brogan posted this post last week regarding StumbleUpon because I’ve been meaning to write something similar. If you check out the image at the top of this post, you will see a list of top referring sites that have led back to my blog since I began. StumbleUpon is not only at the top of the list, but mentioned several times throughout the list.

(Background: StumbleUpon is a social voting/referral tool. After joining for free, you download the SU toolbar. As you go about your daily business, you have the option of giving a thumbs up or a thumbs down to any page. Likewise, you can connect with friends and “stumble” across sites they have liked.)

Like Chris, I have had lots of traffic thanks to StumbleUpon and highly recommend it. In this blog post, I will give you some helpful advice about using StumbleUpon and then list some other similar sites and why they didn’t work as well for me.

Best Practices For StumbleUpon

You can find some great online resources with SU advice, but here are my personal recommendations:

Don’t just vote for your stuff. When I started, I was thumbing up my own work only. This must be a big no-no because I received almost no traffic with this method.
Get involved in the community. Duh, I should have known this one. The more friends I made, the better recommended pages were for me and the more eyeballs who would see my posts.
At high tide, all ships rise. Like all good web 2.0 tools, this is an “and” economy. Your posts don’t suffer because you thumb up someone else’s. Give thumbs up to authors you trust and SU seems to give you more props for knowing good content.
Don’t be a pimp. I don’t stumble all of my posts. I wait until someone else does (which seems to give more stumble-juice) or I only thumb up my best material. This seems to give more “weight” to the ones I do choose.
The more you give, you more you get. SU has given me another opportunity to connect with some of the brightest folks I’ve ever met. Don’t try to game the system - you will receive as much or more than you invest into it.

Notice what’s not on that list of referrals at the top? Most of the other social voting/referral sites. Here is my run-down on some of the more prominent ones in this space. (This is just what I have personally observed. If you’ve had success with these, more power to ya.)

Digg

I have only had a few articles go into the double digits of diggs. But even with those, I never garnered much traffic at all. Granted, I also have not put in the time to become a top digger, either.

Tech stories, great headlines, and lad humor seem to do well on digg; the blogging, writing, social media, marketing space…not so much. That’s why I don’t bother with digg.

Sphinn

Have you ever had a cat who vomited randomly in a hidden corner of the house and then, days afterwards, you are searching down the smell, trying to figure out where it’s coming from? This is how I feel about Sphinn.

I do not have anything against the site or the folks on it. But it’s strange that the articles that do the best are often of the questionable, SEO nature. Or that people who “sphinn” my stuff are those who have just published (indicating to me that they want a return sphinn). Or the lack of useful conversation. It just doesn’t feel right, you know?

I have had a little success pulling traffic from Sphinn postings (always less than 10 people on any given day), so I have not abandoned the method, but I decided to put my efforts elsewhere.

Mixx, PlugIM, BizSugar

The returns simply have not matched the effort. I have to go to the site to participate (rather than through a toolbar like SU) and I just don’t have the time. My initial efforts did not make a ripple in my traffic and I don’t visit much.

That said, you will notice Mixx.com on the list above. A friend recommended one of my articles and he must have had some referral power because I got some traffic on that day. However, on my own, I just don’t have the friends, juice, or time.

So, StumbleUpon It Is?

Well, it is for me. My main piece of advice, however, would be to choose a network and commit to it. Joining a half-dozen social voting sites will dilute your efforts. I guarantee you will get more traffic by working through just one or two voting networks.

And SU is not perfect. As I mentioned on Chris’ post, I think the quality of traffic is much lower. People tend to bounce from one site to another. (I can tell because I convert a much lower percentage to subscribers and they generally do not click around the site to other posts.)

However, the truth remains that higher traffic is better than lower traffic, of course. With more visitors comes more chance of being linked to from another blog, getting a mention on Twitter, or of getting another thumbs up on SU.

Does This Help?

I hope you found this post useful. (If so, stumbling this article is appreciated.) If you would like to connect to me on StumbleUpon, you can find me at http://onlinemarketer.stumbleupon.com/.

Or, tell me if I’m wrong. Maybe I missed a memo on Mixx or I don’t deserve to be dugg (or you’re annoyed by the alarming alliteration). Share your success stories or suggestions with everyone in the comments section below.

If you liked this post, feel free to show some love:

Share it on Twitter