Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Brief report on blog monetization panel at Family Travel Conference

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LOS ANGELES, CA - NOVEMBER 23: A family stack...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Last week, I was privileged to participate on a panel about blog monetization at the inaugural Family Travel Conference . In my presentation I talked a bit about the different ways to make money with your blog as well as some of the considerations if you decide to go the advertising route, including the advantages of working with an ad network. My fellow panelists were Steve Bookbinder of   Digital Media Training, Tim Springstead of Travora (formerly the Travel Ad Network), and moderator Michael Theodore of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

In the Q&A there were a lot of questions about Google and SEO, as Steve had talked a lot about this in his prepared remarks. Now my position on this has remained relatively unchanged for the past 15 years.

You should absolutely optimize your content for search. After all, you do want to be found. Content written for search engines however is not necessarily good for people, whereas smart, compelling content written for people is perfectly acceptable to the search engine. Tweak a bit here and there, use keywords, absolutely. I don’t recommend you make your blog HARDER to find.

But, write for people, not search engines.

And don’t make your business decisions based on whether Google will reward OR penalize your site. Search is only one of the ways your audience finds you.

During the panel the audience and panelists discussed this at some length. One of the examples we discussed was syndicating your work, and whether Google will penalize you if the same post appears in multiple places.

No one knows exactly how Google “does its magic” but if there is proper attribution, usually a link back to the original, Google does not penalize syndicated content.  I think its algorithm will get even smarter as time goes on, as it gains more understanding about reputable aggregators/syndicators  and slime balls. Syndication is becoming an important business model on the web and Google will (if it hasn’t already) figure out the best ways to distinguish between syndicated content — when my post appears on another site with my permission — and content farms , which steal other people’s copyrighted works.

BUT even if it did not — even if syndicating your content to another online publication WOULD be penalized by the search engine, it still might be the best choice, if that site delivers more traffic or helps you establish your expert reputation. I advised the folks to look at the whole picture, not just one tool, one source of traffic.

Toward the end of the panel, we delved a bit into social promotion —Facebook, Pinterest etc. All the panelists felt that Pinterest would be big in travel, and were in general agreement that one didn’t have to be engaging in all the social sharing sites, just the ones that mattered to your audience (something you’ve all read here more than once!) Then one of my fellow panelists said something to the effect of: he wouldn’t advise the audience to abandon Facebook for Pinterest, to which I replied, “I might,” but never got to circle back and explain what I meant

So conference attendees, if you are wondering what I meant — here’s the gist. Far too often folks (whether bloggers or marketers) equate “having a digital/social marketing strategy’ with having a Google and Facebook strategy. A Twitter strategy. Next everyone will be asking, what’s your Pinterest strategy.

This is like nails on a chalkboard to me. What you need is a marketing strategy, and then you look at the toolkit to figure out which tools are the best ones for the job.

Searching (Google) and sharing (Facebook et al) only matter when there’s something to search for or share. Without content, they are irrelevant. So, focus on your content first. Tell your story.

Because if Facebook, Google and all the rest disappeared tomorrow, you would still have a story.

That’s what matters. And what your readers come for.

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Is Facebook the new website?

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This weekend is the Super Bowl, and while I will be paying slightly more attention to the game because the Patriots are playing, my main interest is in the advertising. This year, I will be watching closely to see how many commercials drive to Facebook pages, in addition to or instead of, a website.

Because Facebook is clearly where so many brands are going these days. It reminds me a little of the “web rush” in the mid/late 90s when mainstream brands realized what many tech companies had grokked since the first browser in 1993, that the browser had changed the marketing equation for good. It was a little like a gigantic penny drop. Suddenly every brand had a website, and URLs were promoted everywhere.

Now it is Facebook. Everywhere. Marketing strategies built around Shares and Likes.

This makes me very nervous. Your marketing strategy should include Facebook. With its user base edging every upward to a billion, you would be foolish to not use the social network in your marketing plan.

BUT, your marketing strategy shouldn’t be a Facebook strategy. No matter how small or large you are, don’t put all your eggs, even just for a single promotion, into one basket.

Especially this basket, over which you have no control. All those fans you are spending so much of your budget acquiring? Your connection with them relies almost entirely on Facebook. Sure, you can sign them up for email lists and such, but the community aspect? That happens on Facebook.

And what Facebook gives, Facebook can taketh away. Not literally of course. But it can change its terms or add fees. I am not saying it will hold your brand hostage, but it could.

So, when you are integrating Facebook into your marketing strategy, think about how you can leverage its benefits while protecting your brand’s assets and consumer goodwill.

Go Patriots!

Facebook just wants “to be a real boy”

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This is the time of year when some folks trot out the tarot cards and crystal balls, and attempt to predict the coming year. And others wax eloquent (mostly)  on what transpired in the year just past. Over the 7 years I have been writing this blog, I have generally tried to stay away from this sort of post.

This year, however, that is pretty much what you are going to get. There are a few trends that I have been watching for a while now, always intending to post about them but never quite having  the time. Here’s the first.

Facebook  just wants “to be a real boy” and become a social content platform.

Facebook gets lots of eyeballs — 800 million active  worldwide users, 50% of whom access it everyday according to the company’s stats page. And the boys behind Facebook are smart cookies; they know they need to give people a reason to keep coming back. But, it seems like they aren’t entirely sure that catching up with friends and family and sharing “stuff”  is unique and defensible enough. And mining user data only works if you keep the users.

So they’re hitching their horses to the content wagon, and setting themselves up to be a content platform. Brand pages, apps, timelines and other enhancements designed to make Facebook a source of information, not just connection.

Brands are diving right in. Everyone has a Facebook landing page, contest or app. The ubiquitous URL in advertising has given way to the Facebook like and share buttons.

At the end of the day though, the Facebook platform is inherently hostile to robust content development. It was developed for short form messages and social connections, and layering apps and other tools to make it more content friendly doesn’t make it so.

But we’re sure as shootin’ going to try. Facebook has the eyeballs that brands want, and doesn’t want them to go elsewhere.  The more of our activities and transactions it can own, the better that database gets.  In the coming year,  more and more brands will shift content to Facebook that in the “old days”  would have been on brand-owned microsites.

The $25K question is, will they really recognize sufficient benefit from being on the Facebook platform to make up for the inherent unfriendliness of the platform to branding and deep content. Not to mention the murky area of who owns what on Facebook….

The more transactional, ephemeral and social the content, the more successful the efforts will be. Deep thinking? Complex topics? I just don’t see Facebook as a hospitable place for this. The Facebook brand page just doesn’t have enough branding to make the brands happy, or enough information to make the consumer happy. For one thing,  all the custom developed apps bypass one of the key benefits of Facebook, the simple user interface.

Brands will try, but in the end, I think the winning strategy will continue to be to link into the social graph to promote or aggregate content that lives elsewhere on microsites and blogs. This allows the brand to leverage the social aspects of Facebook, but still own their own robust content platforms.

Unfortunately, at the moment, things are moving in another direction,  and 2012 is going to be the year of bigger and splashier brand pages on Facebook.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.

Should you work for free?

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The social media “industry” is built on the back of people doing “stuff” for free. The business models of most social networks — Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr, YouTube etc. etc. — depend on consumers using the free/”freemium” services and thereby creating both the free content that attracts and retains users, and more importantly, a mine-able database. People. Topics. Linkages (who are your friends, what do you like, where do you go). Marketing gold. And the companies are reaping the benefits of our “work” in potentially ginormous valuations, as discussed in this Businessweek article.

You could argue that posting on Facebook or sending a tweet isn’t work per se. We, the users, are getting something in exchange for our activity — the use of the network to accomplish a personal objective. The question is whether the value is balanced — are we getting enough from our participation in exchange for the value we are helping these companies build?

Honestly, that’s a question that each person must answer for themselves. Participating on Facebook DOES mean that you are surrendering some of your personal privacy, and a great deal of personal information that is going to be aggregated, analyzed, mined and sold. Every Facebook item you post, link or share is going to earn money for Facebook and its investors somehow. Maybe ad revenue. Maybe data mining revenue. But certainly revenue. Facebook is a business, not a public service.

Is it worth it to you? If yes, play away. If not, don’t.

And of course, you can figure out ways to monetize YOUR participation in the networks. Use them to promote your business. Or yourself. It’s all about extracting the value you require from your participation.

The other “work for free” model prevalent in the social media space is influencer relations, which owes its structure to the earned media model inherited from public relations. I’ve written about this before — Is earned media an anachronism?

In a nutshell, the idea is that companies and brands can have such compelling stories that consumers will write about them, share them on their social networks, for free, without compensation. And you know, sometimes that’s true.

Sometimes a product is so compelling that we are happy to harness our word of mouth for no other reason than we love the product. Perhaps Apple products are the only ones that can generate widespread mass word of mouth at the mere whisper of a new version, but we all have things we love that we’re happy to share just because we love them.

I’ll use myself as an example. Recently I bought a SpotBot Pet, a little spot carpet cleaner from Bissell that I first learned about at the BlogPaws conference. It is TERRIFIC, and eventually I will get around to posting a review on my personal blog.

But… products we are intrinsically passionate about are few and far between. Certainly far fewer than the number of firms reaching out to bloggers asking them to work for free on behalf of the brand. To write about a new product. Or attend an event and tweet it up. And so on.

So here’s where I draw the line. If it is work — if you are asked to do a specific thing in a specific fashion or to a deadline — you should be compensated for your time and expertise. Because if you are not paid for your work, it is volunteer work, and if you are going to volunteer for something, it should be something that you care about personally and passionately. I’m pretty sure cereal and motor oil don’t qualify. At least for most of us.

Is a free product adequate compensation? In my opinion, it all depends on what you are being asked to do. Try the product and participate in a short survey? Or leave a comment on a Facebook page? Probably yes. Try the product and write a 500 word blog review? Unless it is use of a car for a year or some other equally large “in kind,” probably not. It’s your call, but remember that the FTC and the IRS do not distinguish between cash and “in kind” compensation. You get a free product, you must disclose, and if you get enough of them, you probably should be reporting the “income” on your taxes. Disclaimer: not a lawyer, not an accountant, consult yours if you have questions about your legal obligations, especially for taxes, which unlike the FTC guidelines, DO have defined penalties for getting it wrong.

So, if you are working in exchange for free product, whatever it is, best to make sure it is something you actually want. Because you may have to pay taxes on it. If it is not something you need or want, cashy money probably would be more useful.

A final point on working for free. I am not saying you shouldn’t volunteer your time, skills or blog content to causes — or even brands — that you care about and want to support. Everyone has to make their own decision on that score. However, if you do work for free, if you give it away, don’t expect the recipient to turn around in future and say, wow, you are so great I should be paying you. Volunteering in the hopes of a paying gig is a losing proposition. It is VERY unlikely to happen.

So when someone asks if they could just pick your brain, or could you just post about this thing on this day and include the following three points, or whatever, understand that you have just created a non-paying customer. And no one can afford too many of those.

Finallly, there’s a fine distinction that I don’t want you to miss. Doing something of your own volition — whether writing a blog, sharing a link or posting on Facebook — is very different than working to someone else’s specifications or timeline. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference when the email box is overflowing with “opportunities.” All I can advise is to consider the value to both parties in the exchange. If it is an even exchange of value, if you are getting what you need to make it worth it (whether cash, products, connections or feeling good about helping out) and so is the other party, go for it.

If not, you may just want to say no.

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Disclosure: I work for BlogHer. We pay the bloggers who write for us.

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BlogHer Visionaries

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the launch of BlogHer’s new consumer panel, Visionaries. I’m very excited about the possibilities we have with the panel to connect the BlogHer audience with brands.

Once or twice a month, we’ll be sending panel members a survey or perhaps even an offer to try a free product. The first trial offer is in the field — sign up for Visionaries now and get a full 12-ounce bottle of Dove® Body Wash with NutriumMoisture™.

Click  here to join.