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Facebook changes algorithm, but nothing really changes for brands. It’s a pay for play world.

January 16, 2018 by Susan Getgood

Facebook announced last week that it was changing the algorithm to favor posts from friends and family over those from brands. It also recently gave users access to the SEE FIRST button for personal profiles as well as brand pages, allowing users to note whose updates they wanted to see first. This is great news for Facebook users, who have been complaining that the algorithm seemed to deliver posts from the same handful of friends, ignoring many others. “I never see your updates,” the oft-heard refrain.

Cue, immediate uproar from publishers, advertisers and brands that these changes would prevent their fans and followers from seeing THEIR updates.

Tempest in a teapot. The only way for brands to reliably get their content in front of their audience on Facebook at scale is to advertise. Facebook ads, boosted posts, branded content. Now it is simply more obvious.

In the short term, yes, these changes are unfortunate for those brands that have developed models for organic Facebook success. They will have to rethink their models and consider using paid posts to get the sharing started, rather than just relying on their content to drive organic shares. But, as long as the content is good, and worth sharing, does it really matter that you have to invest in a small amount of paid to get the party started? I don’t think so. I have long believed that what matters isn’t whether something is paid, owned or earned. It’s whether someone wants to share it. Previous posts on this topic include Shining a light on the native advertising debate from 2014 and Is earned media an anachronism from 2011.

Net, not much has really changed for brands. Facebook is just loudly fixing something that has hampered its user experience, and basking in the brownie points from billions of users.

By this week, the digital advertising press seemed to agree. Nothing new here, more of the same said both Digiday and Adweek.

Filed Under: Branded content, Digital media, Facebook, Social media, The Marketing Economy

11 ingredients for digital success in 2018

December 31, 2017 by Susan Getgood

The past 6 months have seen tremendous upheaval in digital media. Companies that were once high flyers — Mashable, Rolling Stone, Time — sold for a fraction of their former (perceived) value. Whether you think this is massive disruption or simply inevitable course correction, the ingredients for digital success have evolved.

It’s not enough to have a mobile-first site with strong traffic, SEO friendly content, a way to deliver video pre-roll and a good native offering. You DO have to have that, but digital success in 2018 requires a few more ingredients. Scale alone is not enough.

Here’s my recipe for digital success in 2018. Whether you are a digital publisher or a brand extending its content strategy, below is my take on how to turn readers and viewers into true audience that you can then further monetize — events, products, e-commerce etc.

 

11 ingredients for digital success

The Basics
1. Great content. With a point of view
Content with a point of view will be more successful than content that tries to be all things to all people. Vanilla is a lovely flavor, but if everyone offers that same vanilla, content becomes a commodity. Point of view isn’t necessarily an opinion or a “stand;” you don’t have to be news or hard-hitting to have one. It can be everything from a niche target, an overt POV, to a more subtle theme or vision underlying and holding together the content you create. It is NOT a mission statement or manifesto, although those can part of a point of view.

2. A deep understanding of and commitment to your customers — both the one you have and the one you want.
Point of view is likely something you share with your target audience or customers. The more you know about them the easier (but never easy) it will be to build a product they will love. This is equally true if your project is 100% digital, or digital is simply the gateway to purchasing a tangible good. You also have to be committed to looking at your business with a customer-centric lens. Everything truly does depend on making the customer happy. Shortcuts may get you through in the short-term but long-term success for any brand is about delivering to customer needs. Consider expanding the C- suite to include a Chief Customer Officer to be the steward of this effort in partnership with client service, marketing, sales, finance and operations.

3. Data, data, data
Data drives decisions. What gets measured, gets managed. You’ve probably heard these phrases more than once in your career. Simply put, the things we measure are the things we can effectively act upon. If you don’t have data, you can’t adjust, optimize, improve. Of course, for measurement to be effective, you have to define a baseline for success up front so you measure the right things, not every thing. All data is not equally important.

Analytics (website, social platforms, campaign performance) are just the first part of a comprehensive research plan. Third party research data is the second. And proprietary research – into your audience, your content performance, market opinion — is the connective tissue that brings analytics and third party data together into meaningful, actionable information that you can use to make your content better and differentiate from the competition.

Traffic Drivers
Our first set of ingredients are the traffic drivers. How do you find the audience and bring them to your content?

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is your first, and best, friend for building traffic. Nothing — not even paid search — replaces strong organic search results. You can build an internal SEO team or contract an SEO firm to develop your SEO plan and process. However you choose to operationalize SEO, it should be a continuous loop between the content creation team and the SEO management team. But search alone is not enough to ensure success, and you shouldn’t expect it to deliver all your traffic. Against one measure, it scales amazingly well. One well written, search-optimized article can deliver many readers against multiple queries. On another, not so much. You acquire every reader one search at a time. To achieve any scale, you have to keep feeding the beast fresh new content all the time. Even though you can update older content, you still need staff to write and edit. Search is the foundation of your traffic strategy, but it isn’t the whole structure.

5. Social traffic
Social traffic isn’t the panacea either, but you need a robust social strategy to distribute your content on the popular social platforms. Specifically Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter (in descending order of importance). Earned, or “organic,” mentions of your brand are important and you should by all means start with a social communications strategy that leverages your owned social accounts to spread the word about your content and initiatives. But don’t expect earned social to get the volume you need. For most brands, organic social reach is a delightful myth. While your audience may follow your accounts for the news, they aren’t going to re-share it at the volume you need to reach new audiences. And then there’s the fact that the algorithms of social (Facebook in particular) are DESIGNED to push you toward paid social. Ads, boosted posts etc. Don’t fight it. Embrace it. Make it work.

My advice is to post your news and stories and get the organic reach that your audience will naturally deliver. Then boost the best performing posts to reach new readers. This will increase the potential pool that might share the content, thus increasing your earned media. Branded content in the form of influencer-generated posts is an important ingredient; consider MarketingLand’s report this week on research done by social analytics firm Shareablee showing that viral reach from branded content ads on Facebook eclipses standard ads.

6. Native advertising
The power of native content is why you should use your web and social analytics, and even your SEO analyses, to identify the best content to put in native advertising units. Publishers may prefer to promote the branded content they create in their native units, but increasingly they are opening their inventory up to native programmatic as well as premium native advertising using content sourced elsewhere. Plus of course services like Taboola and Outbrain, although I recommend that you regularly evaluate whether the traffic you get from less-premium sources is the same quality that you get from more premium sources of traffic.

But like SEO, social posts and native ads deliver one reader, one viewer, one click at a time. Scale requires volume. Every increase has a real cost to produce and distribute the content. It’s effective, but not terribly efficient.

In addition to growing your unique users, you need to convert those one-time readers and viewers into a loyal audience. You want them to keep coming back for more, and consuming more than one piece of content at each visit. In analytics terms, you want your uniques to keep growing, but your page and video views to eclipse uniques. In my opinion, 4x is a baseline for good, and you really want it to be much more than that. Our next set of critical ingredients are the engagement and loyalty drivers.

Engagement and Loyalty Drivers
These ingredients deepen your readers’/viewers’ relationship with your content.

7. Newsletters
What’s old is new again! Newsletters are the best mechanism to get casual readers/visitors into into your content ecosystem and regularly coming back for new content. Because they are permission-based, with the user having control over what data is shared with the publisher, they are more compatible with privacy regulations like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will become increasingly important for any firm doing business with EU nationals when GDPR takes effect in May 2018.

That said, getting permission from the user is only part of the privacy mandate; you also have to protect it, so your newsletter tech needs to be super smart. Bottom line though, the more you can get the reader/viewer to share with you (first party data), the less you will be restricted by potential regulations/restrictions on the use of third party data from the big databases. That means delivering real value in exchange for personal information, and the more you ask, the more value you must add.

Don’t use your newsletter simply as an index to articles on your site. Folks may subscribe but they won’t necessarily become loyal readers (and repeat visitors) if the newsletter is nothing more than a promotional tool for your articles. Take the time to create some original content around the articles you recommend. Follow the example of Digiday; its daily newsletter highlights articles from the Digiday site, but it places them in context, giving the reader value even before she clicks over.

8. Recommendations
Website design matters. It is all well and good to say that no one comes to your home page, so giving it undue importance is wasted effort. For many, site visits are driven by search and social directly to the content. But the structure of content on the site once someone gets there and their ability to discover new, relevant content matters. A lot.

Publishers and brands need to invest in recommendation engines and native units that bring readers/viewers deeper into content based on their interests. Baseline is a smart keyword/topic match to the article/video they are reading or viewing, but we need to push the envelope on this. As we build stable databases of loyal readers’ preferences and past viewing habits, we should make inferences about the type of additional content they would like to consume, both editorial but also branded content. The better we match our recommendations to their interests, the more likely they are to consume multiple pages of content by choice, and not just because you split the content up into 7 pages.

9. Video (but smarter)
Digital publishers by and large have struggled with video. There is huge advertiser demand, nowhere near enough quality inventory, and strategy after strategy to manufacture it has met with lukewarm success at best. Facebook seems to be the hands-down winner for delivering targeted video eyeballs, followed by the video aggregators like Jun Group who have fed the digital demand of both publishers and brand-direct.

What seems clear to me, whether you are looking at digital, linear or OTT, is that successful video strategy is grounded in more than just delivering consumer eyeballs through targeting and audience acquisition strategies. If you BUY every view for slightly less than you re-sell it to your advertiser client, your business cannot scale efficiently. It works for a while, but eventually the advertiser figures out that she can buy that same eyeball direct.

To be successful with video, it comes back to figuring out what resonates with your audience, what fits with your editorial or brand mission, and most importantly, what you can do better, smarter than the other guy. I wrote about this in September. Success is rooted in smart content strategy, incorporating video where it makes sense for the story, not simply to deliver advertising. We shouldn’t pivot to video; we should integrate video into a multi-format digital strategy that includes all sorts of content. For a successful publisher’s take on this issue, check out Digiday’s report on Bustle’s strategy.

Even if your content is primarily text, and doesn’t seem to “need” video to tell the story, for example B2B content, you need to start at least thinking about video. Pew Research reported this spring that millenials are now the largest living generation : “In 2016, there were an estimated 79.8 million Millennials (ages 18 to 35 in that year) compared with 74.1 million Baby Boomers (ages 52 to 70).”

This generation looks at and engages with content — both digital and IRL — differently than the older generations. For many in the cohort, video is the preferred communication medium. Business sites that want to reach this new worker need to think about how to incorporate video into their content strategy.

For what its worth, I think it helps to think about video as 5 basic types.

  1.  News / Documentary — current events, educational, fact-based. Your purpose is to convey specific information to viewers, and you may or may not have a specific point of view and desire to convince / persuade.
  2. Comedy — Make ‘em laugh.
  3. Caught on Tape — There is a reason “America’s Funniest Home Videos” has been on television for more than 20 years. People LOVE to watch real people and animals in funny, silly situations. The quality of the videos may be dodgy, but the quality of the engagement is not. See also babies, puppies and kittens.
  4. How-To – do just about anything. Cook, apply make-up, style a wardrobe, decorate, garden, change a tire, take pictures, make videos, even business topics can come to life in video. You name it, there is a how-to video to show you the way. This is the easiest type of content for publishers and brands to add to their sites, and our appetite for it is insatiable.
  5. Scripted entertainment with HIGH production values — the market has been cornered by linear and OTT properties created by the big entertainment studios, especially at long-form, but I think there is room for scripted short-form where talented amateurs can be competitive with the big guys.

In my opinion, there are two successful video strategies. You can specialize in one type of video, and go deep and long to meet the needs of your audience for that type of content on your channel. In an increasingly crowded marketplace, you must have an unserved or underserved niche to be successful. The other strategy, which is the one most publishers and brands would be well-served by, is that you integrate the appropriate type into your story telling as needed, but your focus is the stories. You don’t need to specialize in one form as much as you need to make sure that the video you are creating is additive to the stories your audience comes to you for.

Note that some of these formats lend themselves naturally to the development of community, ie the fans that are loyal viewers. For example, comedy shows, reality TV, and character driven drama or comedy. Others are more likely to be driven by search engine results such as tutorials. Current events are a bit of a blend. We may be fans of a particular franchise such as The Rachel Maddow Show, but much of the time, we are driven by search about a specific news item.

Make small, smart investments in your original video programming, and then look at the numbers – what drives traffic and engagement? Do more of that. Drop anything that doesn’t work, no matter how much you love it.

10. Community
Influencers must become part of your content ecosystem. For branded content but also more broadly to extend the footprint of a publication or brand authentically into the community. This takes a different shape if you are a brand using your content strategy to directly promote your company and its products or a publisher, aggregating content and monetizing through advertising, but the fundamental principle is the same.

Go beyond seeing your customers as content or product consumers, and engage your audience in the content creation process. Last fall, I outlined how this might look for a digital publisher. The most important thing to remember is that you want to create multiple touch points for your customers into your brand or publication, and leverage their contributions as much as you can. Everything from deep relationships and extended partnerships with brand ambassadors or top-tier contributors to simple content creation programs with mid-tier influencers and earned media with micro influencers.

11. E-commerce
Many publishers are leaving money on the table by not integrating shopping into their sites. For branded content for sure, but also to earn against the products used in the normal course of business. Where can I get the clear mixer bowl in that video? I love what the host was wearing. Show me similar outfits. One needs no further proof that this is a smart strategy than that Amazon has launched an influencer program to develop branded content as an extension of its affiliate marketing program.

Online retailers like ShopStyle have a robust affiliate program as well as content programs using influencers. Publishers like Diply, Mashable and Bustle have incorporated e-commerce on their sites, to varying degrees:

  •  CRO and President of Diply Dan Lagani sat down with Cheddar to talk about the potential of e-commerce for digital publishers.
  • Bustle in the Wall Street Journal:  “The company has also signed additional video deals with Facebook Inc. and YouTube, and boosted its affiliate commerce, where it takes a cut of product sales generated by links included in its posts.”

But for long-term success, publishers need to develop e-commerce strategies that do not depend on Amazon affiliate income; Amazon will likely start cutting its affiliate commission rates as it further develops its own content strategy. Whether they choose to go direct to brand, partner with the affiliate networks like CJ Affiliate and Rakuten or partner with retailers, the key will be to integrate the shopping cart in such a way that it is non-intrusive to, but integrated with the content experience. The smarter, the better. Bonus for integrating influencers into the mix, as ShopStyle does.

The other e-commerce play is to have your own product line. Not every publisher has the wherewithal, the brand or the stomach for this, but if you have your own products, you are the original channel 😃 Subscription boxes were all the rage this year; no matter what your interests, you can probably sign up for a box of merchandise to be delivered to your door every month.

The garnish — a podcast

A podcast, my last ingredient for you, is more of a garnish than a requirement, so I am not counting it among the 11required ingredients for 2018, but I suspect it will be one by 2019.

Podcasting is the most social of social media. The format is so simple — a conversation between/among two or more people that makes us feel, with the intimacy of sound, like we are seated at the table too.

According to Edison Research, podcast reach has grown by 50% over the last four years, and nearly a quarter of Americans age 12 or older listen to a podcast monthly. Podcasts are most popular among 18-34s, but teens and the 35-54s are also listeners. 41% of Americans listen to some form of “speech” audio on any given day.

Right now, the playing field, and opportunity, is wide open to all. The duopoly of Facebook and Google are no better situated than any other player to establish a podcast audience and generate revenue from (and with) that audience. Even though many big advertisers are still waiting for listener metrics to get better, Edison projected podcasts to earn $220 million in ad revenues in 2017. Publishers searching for new sources of revenue would be well served by considering a podcast. It ticks a lot of boxes — content, community, native advertising, low barrier to entry and easy to experiment with formats.

The fast and simple way in is to sponsor an existing podcast that aligns with your brand values/proposition and reaches your target audience. The longer way around, and the more lucrative for a publisher, is to create a new podcast that delivers unique value for your brand and to your advertisers. I highly recommend looking to your community of readers/viewers/influencers for both hosts and guests.

And there you have it — 11 ingredients for digital success plus a bonus garnish. Thanks for sticking with me to the end.

Filed Under: Blogging, Branded content, Community, Content marketing, Digital, Digital media, Influencer Marketing, Newsletter, Podcasting, Social media, The Marketing Economy, Web Marketing Tagged With: Advertising, Facebook, Google, Google Search, Marketing, Measurement, Social media

3 tips for more successful email newsletters

September 15, 2017 by Susan Getgood

In recent posts, I have been focusing on the role and value of an engaged community in marketing success. Email newsletters are a critical component in “feeding” the community as well as informing the larger audience. For a publisher, convincing a reader or viewer to subscribe to updates closes the content loop, and makes them a highly valued Joiner, to borrow a term from Jeffrey Rohrs, author of Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans and Followers (affiliate link.) For a brand, the subscriber has given permission to be contacted directly, which brings them is one step closer to becoming a customer.

Yet, we don’t leverage newsletters as well as we could. It is simply too hard to create and send newsletters for most marketing organizations, so we don’t create enough of the super-targeted or opportunistic missives that are more likely to lead to success. Our newsletters are broad and generic, and often deleted unopened. Even those that are offer-driven tend to hit too wide or too late to drive the consumer behavior we want.

Some of the challenges that contribute to this are:

  • lack of email systems connectivity to websites and sales/marketing databases, to more efficiently manage the lead flow process and target emails more specifically to consumer interests and behavior;
  • design requirements. A well-designed newsletter is more likely to succeed but most marketers aren’t designers, and the design backlog can be a roadblock to getting timely missives “in the mail;”
  • organizational silos that put the power of the email newsletter tools in one department, making is difficult for others to harness the tactic for their business objectives.

How can we do better with newsletters? Short of fixing the three challenges I noted above, which are longer term, organizational issues, there are three things you can do immediately.

  1. Review YOUR newsletter subscriptions, and think about the ones that actually engage you past the first, heady SUBSCRIBE moment. Which you likely did as the result of another transaction (download a white paper, enter a sweepstakes, purchase a product, etc.) I recently did this as part of a massive INBOX ZERO effort, and pruned a lot of newsletters that I never even opened. The ones that remain (including a few that I remember subscribing to FOR the content) passed one of two tests: I am a customer, want to get the special offers, and have acted on a newsletter at least once or I regularly share on social or use articles in my blog posts;
  2. Better target YOUR subscribers that exhibit these engagement behaviors and also target their lookalikes. What content works? What doesn’t? Even if you have lots of subscribers to your newsletters, most of them are passive. Keep sending those passive users your content, because opens do still matter, but spend more time on the engaged readers. Offer them exclusive access or content to increase their loyalty;
  3. Scrub your list regularly. Get rid of the subscribers who don’t ever open your content. They just inflate your subscriber numbers which makes your open rate look bad.

Your email newsletters can be one of your most effective community engagement tools. Or they can be digital “bin fodder.”

Your choice.

Updated 18 September to add link to an article from eMarketer reporting on a July 2017 survey by Adobe that puts some quantitative measures to some of the points I discuss in this post.  Not surprisingly, 50% of respondents said the most annoying thing about email marketing was frequency – too much. None of the other reasons even got close to similar significance, BUT among the top complaints were two data-related issues: an offer than makes it clear that the data about me is wrong (24% ) and urging me to buy something I have already purchased (20%).

Filed Under: Community, Marketing, Newsletter

The future of digital media: Creating a new content ecosystem

September 13, 2017 by Susan Getgood

Second of (probably) three posts about the future of digital media

Quality Content + Audience at Scale + Community =
Sustainable Engagement, Loyalty and Conversion

In my previous post, I presented this marketing equation. It means that for publishers of content, whether a media company or a brand, creating quality content and building a large audience is not sufficient to drive sustainable consumer engagement, loyalty and conversion.

We need a community.

There is a certain “duh” about that statement. Of course community is important. Fandom is the bedrock of social media. But I don’t think we’ve quite hit on how to effectively use community to reach our marketing goals. To truly partner with our community, not just create content for it (the typical publishing model), or build spaces where it can can create its own content or connect with likeminded folks (the social platforms, including blogs).

In this post, I am going to cover a concept for how digital publishers/channels can collaborate with the community to create higher value content. It is by no means the only way to partner with or build community.

The idea:
A content ecosystem created around media sites or brands that seamlessly combines “owned and operated” editorial content with content created by consumers (the community) but on their OWN sites or platforms, not hosted within the media property or brand site. Accompanied by robust revenue shares between the publisher/brand and the community partners.

How we get there:
People don’t visit destination sites the way we did when the web was young and we bookmarked all the sites we loved and checked them frequently for new content. Search and social drive discovery, and loyalty is fleeting, especially in B2C lifestyle content. It is a distributed model, and we may not even be aware of where we are consuming the information  (a problem for another day.)

Tightly focused verticals and B2B, which is sort of a vertical, are slightly different and may still see some success as “destinations,” but the cachet of writing for a mainstream vehicle is far less than it was “back in the day.” Content creators can find their audience and create a community without the endorsement of mainstream brands.

As a result, the model of getting people to create content on a destination site for free just won’t work very well and it doesn’t scale easily (if at all.) That’s not how we consume content, and the value exchange is unbalanced. The content creator gets far less than the site owner; the cachet of writing for a site — even HuffPo — only goes so far. The site owner may not be getting exactly the content it expected either. If you aren’t paying someone, it is much harder to dictate what they produce or maintain your desired content quality.

Syndication is a better choice for the content creator, as it offers the possibility of click-over to the original content site, where the content creator can monetize through advertising and potentially bring the viewer deeper into HER content. The mainstream site owner can control quality by only syndicating content that meets its quality standards and editorial needs.

But syndicated content is rarely integrated with the editorial content alongside which it lives. It disrupts the flow of content experience, just like advertising does. And more so when it is sponsored content syndicated into a native unit within a site.

If we really want to increase the long-term value of content — to publishers, brands, consumers, content creators, everyone — we need a better model.

My ideal content network is a community-centered editorial ecosystem. With an integrated editorial strategy that leverages the contributions of the publisher/brand and the distributed sites on the community network, somewhat like a hub and its spokes.

How many spokes? 20-25 contributing sites that really match the editorial mission. If you cover multiple vertical markets, 15 or so per vertical, depending on how many verticals you have. You really don’t want more than 100 or so content partners in the editorial community. Because you have to deliver a high degree of service to maximize the value – yours to them as a content and probably advertising partner, and theirs to you as content producers in your ecosystem that will help you deliver a great content experience and scale more easily. Remember: they continue to invest in building their audience just as you do yours. The collective effort increases scale beyond the capacity of any individual.

When a viewer finds a piece of content — however and wherever she enters your ecosystem, she is offered additional content that matches her interests through contextual matching, behavioral targeting and as she comes back, knowledge of her content consumption. What does she love? What content is she more likely to engage with? Offer her the best matches, both on the site and across all the content partners.

What’s the tech that does this? I have some ideas, based on things I have been working on recently, but this doesn’t have to be complicated to start. It is a simple commitment to build an integrated content strategy with the community, where content lives equally in both places.

Why does this matter so much? Consumers are already banner blind unless they are actively seeking. Without some innovation, they will become equally blind to native advertising, which is the most relied upon method for scaling sponsored content. I also expect that midroll ads on Facebook video are going to impact video completion rates far more than preroll did. It’s disruptive, and consumers hate being disrupted. (Side bar: I am already sick of the insurance company souffle.)

These common ad formats won’t go away. They have their place in the ecosystem, but it is largely top of funnel, driving awareness and interest. If we want to drive down the purchasing funnel, we need to engage consumers with our message, and convert them to customers.

Branded content, and most specifically influencer content, is the key. Consumers are more likely to trust influencer recommendations than any other source when it comes to purchasing a product (Source: In the Company of Friends, SheKnows/Research Narrative Influencer Marketing Study, October 1, 2015, PDF.)

By creating a more hospitable ecosystem for influencer content, in which we seamlessly move within the content network, the experience of reading or viewing sponsored content is less disruptive. We’ve already accustomed our reader to following her interests across our network with our “regular” content. The branded content experience looks much the same. Anchoring branded content or video, usually on the brand or mainstream media site (but not necessarily,) seamlessly integrated with influencer content on other blogs or social platforms. With the right intelligent tools, we could even target sponsored content to the most likely consumers, eliminating the circulation “waste” of readers that are not in the target demo.

As I noted above, you wouldn’t need hundreds of influencers as content creation partners in such a community ecosystem. 20, 25 per content area or niche. But you could complement the vertical networks with microinfluencer activations and social marketing promotions on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you didn’t want to build out your own group of social influencers, there are PLENTY of agencies and software platforms that you can contract on a campaign or annual license basis.

This model is far from complete as I’ve described it here, and there are a number of considerations not even mentioned, but we’ve been circling around this idea of community-centered publishing for years. HuffPo built the first relatively successful model where folks would write for free, and Medium came along to scale it, but neither quite got there in the end. HuffPo is at its core a contributor-fueled website that sells ads. Medium had no center to serve as the hub for the spokes of distributed content, making it too hard for advertisers to buy. From Medium. Without the hub that adds value, brands can create influencer marketing programs on their own. No need to come to a publisher.

YouTube has a revenue share model with its content creators, but it too is center-less, relying on brands and content creators to create broadcast channels for some semblance of structure. It’s still very much the wild wild west. Other media businesses, from BlogHer and SheKnows to CafeMom/Media and the now-shuttered Mode developed variations on this theme, and got very close, but each time, one side of the ecosystem dominated, either the O&O channel/site or the partner network.

Largely because the media industry wasn’t ready for such a distributed model.

For this ecosystem to work, the two sides need to be equally  important, content partners. Decisions about where content runs are driven by creating the highest long term value for the content and consumer relationships, which creates the value for the partner sites.  Ownership — of content, even of exclusive relationships, is less important than results and creation of value. This is not the usual way we do things. When valuing a company, one of the first questions is what do you own – content, technology, exclusive contracts. In our distributed model, we don’t own all the assets, but we are using them in proprietary ways to create value.

And everybody wins.

Especially the customers, who get quality content about the topics and brands they love, from a variety of trusted voices, editors and consumer advocates alike.

I think and hope we are ready now. I’d love to build this.

15 September: Updated to add link to an excellent column by Jack Myers: How Wall St. Priorities are Damaging the Media Ecosystem

Final post in the series (for now) will be some thoughts about video specifically.

Filed Under: Blogging, Community, Content marketing, Digital media, Influencer Marketing, Marketing

The future of digital media: The value of community

September 12, 2017 by Susan Getgood

first in a series of at least 3 posts about the future of digital media

Community

Of late, I have been thinking a lot about how we make content more successful. Especially branded content, but really any content.

Whether a publisher, who monetizes content through advertising, or a brand, which monetizes content through product sales, fundamentally all content is created with two objectives:

  • to inform, educate or entertain the audience;
  • to serve as a vehicle for advertising messages, including display, native, branded content, catalogs, shopping carts.

As marketers, our goal is to create the most successful content we can: well written or produced content (quality) consumed by the largest possible volume of interested consumers (scale), with the best outcome possible for advertised products— increased awareness, preference, trial or sale, depending on the KPI (conversion.) The standardized measures of success are pageviews, ad impressions, clicks, conversions and for extra credit, time on site and repeat visitors.

Search engines changed the way we find content, and social has amplified the mercurial nature of the consumer. We no longer habitually bookmark our favorite sites and rarely browse through a publication in the “I feel lucky mode.” With the possible exception of publications that we actually pay for, such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post, we don’t “read the paper.” We search, we follow friend’s social recommendations, and maybe, just maybe,if we enjoy our experience on a site, we remember and are more likely to visit the next time it turns up in search or social. Nirvana for the publisher: we have such a good experience with a site, we subscribe to its newsletter and enter its content ecosystem.

But with organic search and social, we aren’t really targeting the information seeker. She is pulling content based on her interests.

Advertising is different. When we are paying, we can and do target.

Ad targeting has transformed the ad side of the digital media industry, from the data management platform (DMP) to the increasing dominance of programmatic in the advertising mix. We are really good at finding the audience.

Certainly we should use caution, and sometimes skepticism, when considering audience demographics — think of the recent New York Times report that Facebook estimates its young American audience to be 25 million more than the actual number of 18-34 year olds in last year’s US census — but third-party tools from Nielsen and comScore help validate audience claims. At a minimum, they put everyone on the same, comparable playing field, which gives advertisers directional guidance.

Dodgy marketing claims aside, we are better at finding and reporting on audiences than ever before.

The question is, how do we get them to come back, to consume more content. To become loyal readers or viewers who consume a lot of content on each visit. Who engage with our branded content at the same level as our organic content. Who convert into customers.

Because, for publishers, re-selling each viewer at a slight mark-up for what it cost to acquire that page or video view is not sustainable. Unless you add measurable value to that view, such as increased conversions, the pyramid will eventually collapse. Brands will figure out that they can buy those views, that awareness, cheaper if they go direct.

Even then, even if they go direct, brands will not continue to pour cash into the funnel —whether YouTube or Facebook or programmatic media or influencer posts — to acquire views that do not convert into engaged viewers and customers.

The key is community. Tapping successfully into ones that form naturally “in the wild,” creating new ones, temporary at first, ideally permanent, around the content we create, and feeding the community with the additional sustaining value – informational, transactional, exclusive, financial – that encourages deeper engagement beyond the simple view or click to buy.

Your community is in your audience, but they are not synonymous. You will (hopefully) always have a much larger potential audience than you will an engaged community. But it is in your community that you find your evangelists, your influencers, your advocates. The audience members that will become your partners in promoting, in creating new customers.

Now, I am not so foolish as to think that this is a new idea. The essential value of community in marketing has long been known. Community is the underlying fuel of social media marketing, the entire gaming ecosystem, successful loyalty programs and multilevel marketing. Among others.

But I think we have only dabbled at the edges of how community can drive success for those of us publishing, and monetizing, content on the web.

It looks something like this:

Quality Content + Audience at Scale + Community =

Sustainable Engagement, Loyalty and Conversion

Filed Under: Community, Digital media, Marketing, Social media, The Marketing Economy

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