Listening to the Customer Should Be Literal, Not Metaphorical

Sometimes you just have to take your focus group right to the customer – in person. 

Are you listening to the voice of the customer? Really?

Literally or just metaphorically?

Listen to this story.

I took my son to a college open house, and about 20 minutes before the start of a general session a suited gentleman approached the boy and asked: “Could you take eight or 10 minutes to help us decide on a new cover for our university publication?”

Having effectively appealed to my son’s ego and instinct for altruism – and to my own lifelong interest in publications (“You can come too, dad”) – this gentleman, who turned out to be the university’s admissions director, trotted us off to a nearby makeshift focus group room to which they were directing successive waves of students.

With four of their would-be “customers” captive, the admissions director and a publications editor displayed foamcored mockups of admissions brochure cover and ran the students through a series of rapid-fire questions.

...But wait, what does this have to do with online media? Simple: we should be doing the same thing with our customers, which is to say, our audience. That is, we should be conducting focus groups – live and in-person rather than from behind the scrim of email and SurveyMonkey. Just as college-bound high school students are bombarded with mailings from universities, so our audiences have dozens – nay, hundreds, thousands, thanks to Google – of websites vying for their attention. By understanding their visceral reaction at the moment of deciding whether to view, we can make sure our products are more "signal" than "noise."

Here are big lessons I took away from observing this simple but savvy student focus group.

(1) Get right to the core question: Do or would you even look at my product in the first place? The first question asked of the students was the most important: Do you think you would pick up any of these first publications if they were lying on a coffee table or in a stack of mail? Likewise: Looking at our website or enewsletter – is this something you would take upon yourself to engage with? If you can’t get past this first hurdle, the rest is academic.

(2) Ask why. Once the students had come to a loose consensus on what they didn’t like – i.e., the type on this artsy cover is too hard to read; those two have just typography and don’t look very inviting – they vocalized what they did like about the winner: It had a big photo of the campus; it helped them to visualize where they might be living for four years. This was an obvious but very valuable insight, I thought. In fact, any insight is valuable. If a segment of your audience told you that your information-packed home page gave them everything they need to quickly review, at a glance, would that be bad? Negative comments can lead to good improvements; positive comments can bolster marketing campaigns.

(3) Keep the discussion objective. The designers – I assume they were students – were not present at the focus group discussions. So the administrators, perhaps less vested in the outcome, were quick to briskly remove the rejected covers. Might we also consider not having a website’s developer, designer and editor present? Having them in the room might hinder the focus group's objectivity (and maybe even the facilitator's).

(4) Consider the power of group dynamics and peer pressure. I thought it was interesting that the students were brought in in packs of four. One might argue that this could lead to groupthink but I thought it prevented any of the students from dashing off an answer or telling the researchers what they thought they wanted to hear. As the students warmed up to each other, each comment of their comments was greeted either with “I agree completely” or with “Really? I was thinking more like…" Through the participants' back-and-forth banter, an evolving and probably really accurate picture began to emerge.

Long story short: If you’re thinking about improving your emedia products – and you should be, all the time – it may be back-to-school time.

Where the Interwebs Kicks Print's A**

(It's instant gratification.) 

I had a revelation today.

Intrigued by a cover blurb on a randomly tossed past issue of Fast Company lying at the office, I opened not the magazine to decrypt the teaser (“The Most Hated Brand in America”) – for I had dread expectations not just of FC’s preposterous portrayals of businesspeople as hipster-heroes, but also of a diabolically hidden page number on the TOC and a story placement deep in the bowels of the issue – but instead opened my browser, which in seconds gave me what I wanted: my answer (“Ticketmaster,” with an amen, brother).

This caused me to ask: If print is going to ably compete with the web’s information-at-your-fingertips, would it not better itself by dispensing with the old, tarted-up come-ons of the previous print era and start getting readers right to the point?

Or is the ‘tease’ a huge part of print’s appeal?

Beyond the Banner

Online media offers a nearly infinite number of alternatives to garden-variety website advertising

Several websites and a few enewsletters here at Meister Media Worldwide are running into an enviable position: their inventory of ad positions is running out for the year.

This is not so enviable for some marketers, however. How can we accommodate prized advertisers who want in? In a few markets we’ve “sub-leased” spots to up to three rotations. And as our pageviews grow, we’re moving away from blanket run-of-site buys and toward more contextually pointed “channel” buys – i.e., amidst topical areas of high relevance to individual advertisers’ products or services.

But moving from a time to an impressions model isn’t really a solution for us – way too much seasonality in our agricultural / horticultural markets. When buyers want January-to-March primetime exposure, they want January-to-March primetime exposure, not reaching a faster-than-anticipated impressions threshold that spins their ad off the site two or three weeks earlier than they expected.

Nor is adding ad slots a good solution either. There's too much clutter on the site that puts off the user. Plus, as is amply proven in just-released research into the effect of ad placement on ad effectiveness, “ghettoizing” an ad well below the fold doesn’t do anybody any good.

So what options are left? Plenty. Here’s a quick rundown of a trio of major options we’re setting before our prized advertisers who may have been shut out of the banner spots they wanted.

Emails. These can be in the form of edirects or sponsorships of target enewsletters around specific topics. We suggest this option with a dash of caution, always leery of creating list fatigue, but outbound email is a great way to hook an audience and bring ‘em in.

Custom landing pages and microsites. When email brings ‘em in, it often is to this “third way” of websites: something between content-filled media sites and marketing-oriented product/service sites. These can be as elaborate as a 10-page product site, or as simple as a one-page company introduction. We custom-build them either way. Absolutely essential to the model though: these must have response mechanisms to harvest leads and inquiries.

Video. All kinds of possibilities here, from pre-roll ads on editorially-produced video “channels” to sponsorship slots amid video news reports. We’ve even developed a “video product showcase” platform that gives certain advertisers just what they need: a place to “post and host” their video, along with for-more-information links to ancillaries of their own choosing (technical paper PDFs, other videos, web articles, mail-tos, etc.) and custom video production if they so choose, which many of them do.

In the end the bias of online media is toward access and interactivity. With or without banner ad availability, all of us in media need to be ready to provide advertisers with a host of options.

7 Ways to Sabotage Your Editorial Career

A wry primer on being a survivor

(Originally written for the National Blog of the American Society of Business Publication Editors)

You’re weary of b-to-b media. The pay ain’t that great and you’re working harder than ever. Looking for that push to get you out the door? Follow this plan and you’ll be in graduate school by fall semester, guaranteed.

(1) Wage a silent war with your audience about what they really should be reading. Never mind web and readership metrics showing that (for instance) nuts-and-bolts, how-to pieces are among your most-read content. Give ‘em “thought-leader,” “industry issues” articles and more of ‘em. It’s your journalistic duty.

(2) Leave the digital stuff to the digital people. Everyone knows print still pays the bills around here. There may be a day when digital passes print (Ed. note: if it hasn’t already), but with any luck you’ll be retired by then. Anyway, it’s not something you need to worry about today.

(3) Leave the sales stuff to the sales people. Hey, if those guys in sales can’t sell ads around our excellent editorial, that’s their problem. And they expect you to forward news about marketing plans and new product launches? Pssssshhh. That’s privileged information.

(4) Spend a lot of time on developmental projects with big profiles but minimal audience exposure. Hey man, it’s a quality-versus-quantity thing. Through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn you can reach hundreds of key influencers who actively follow your work versus thousands and thousands of anonymous readers who never respond. Plus, building an iPhone or iPad app would be so awesome.

(5) Vocally define “content” solely as text that has been produced by a qualified journalist. You’d like to open the floor to your audience but how would you ever possibly hope to edit and filter it? Anyway, in the time it would take you to requisition, hunt down and edit an industry-written article you could just write it yourself.

(6) Present video and audio as just a Q&A. Isn’t online media novel and interesting enough in its own right? Anyway, you really don’t have time to edit the footage because you have another magazine issue to get out.

(7) Assert that everything you need to know you learned in j-school! College taught you eternal truths. What was true then is equally true now.

Career-Sustaining Thoughts. Okay, so maybe there’s just a tinge of sarcasm in all this. And an editor conceivably could do every one of these things and remain employed. So let’s turn this faux advice upside down and take away some career-sustaining (dare I say career-enhancing?) thoughts.

• Editorial-mission reporting will always be important, but your audience is reading certain things and not others for a reason. Follow it.
  
  
• You can no more abdicate emedia know-how to the ones-and-zeroes crowd than you would turn over your magazine to the printing-press guys. Harness online media to its full journalistic potential.
  
  
• It’s a battle in the trenches today to get ad support for business media. Every hand is needed on deck – including editorial. This goes for “special sponsored” projects too. Online media has elevated the role of content in marketing. Even if you’re not the one actually producing so-called “advertorial” content, bring a journalistic eye to help shape it. Everyone will benefit.
  
  
• Social media like Twitter and Facebook are wonderful amplifiers for the journalist’s voice. And mobile apps and tablet editions will be de rigueur soon enough. But until your metrics show a goodly chunk of your online audience is coming to you through mobile and social rather than through garden-variety organic, email and search, you’ll be better off spending the majority of your time on the intrinsic quality of your core content and using social media sparingly for outbound promotion and inbound audience participation. As for mobile, seriously consider an app when mobile’s share of inbound website traffic reaches 10%. The key point: nudge your audience, yes, but move when they move.
  
  
• The very media enterprise that employs you is in business to improve the professional lives of its audience members. Why not give your audience a voice? It would be an egregious omission to exclude them, wouldn’t it? Plus, bringing in well-respected industry voices can do nothing but enhance the relevance of your own product in your own industry.
  
  
• We need more quality in video, even if it means less quantity (especially if it means less quantity). Imagine if you’d had a magazine stringer who consistently passed off lightly edited interview transcripts as full-fledged articles. Same problem with plain-vanilla Q&A videos that consist of two or three minutes of talking heads looking slightly off camera. Audiences crave narrative, storytelling and context; give it to them in video and audio, just like you do in print.
  
  
• Many j-schools are doing an admirable job of catching up with the online information revolution, but the sad fact is that much college communications curricula still is geared to dying print and TV/radio models. Filmmaking, literature, music, the graphic arts, and animation will inspire and teach you as much about the rhythms and techniques of capturing and sustaining an audience as the old “if it bleeds, it leads” dogma ever could. Keep your eyes and ears open.

Here’s hoping you keep and enjoy this career in business media — now and in the years to come.

Old Media and Social Media

Isn't it all just about the conversation?

Traditional media, accustomed for so long to its singular access to a megaphone, has awakened to the conversational Babel called social media and feels…well, a little threatened. And so, to the trumpet’s-blare of “revolutionary change” we in the media now march, and who’s to say whether in the end we’ll prove to have under-reacted or overreacted?

Will social media convulse traditional media? Yes, I think so. To share your stage with your audience is difficult when your life’s focus and fulfillment have rotated around the control and wee bit of stardom journalism brings: bylines, top story placement, and discretion over who among your audience gets to respond and how and when.

It continues to be a bracing bit of reality as well to acknowledge that more and more of your online audience is tapping their own social networks rather you – the media, the historic gatekeeper – for information and context.

Conversely I hardly think social media – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, et al – will put traditional media out of business, and I cite the evolution of the social media king itself as evidence. Once upon a time Facebook was a nearly media-free sanctuary of birds-of-a-feather conversations, until…people began running out of things to talk about. Or started looking for more things to talk about. Enter “Share Link” and “Share Video,” which more often than not has become one more distribution channel for traditional media, albeit with the distinction of allowing the audience to place their own spin right along with the reporter's.In short, Facebook has not put media out of business; it has used media, to media’s mutual benefit.

Fact is, we in the traditional media could have turned over more “share of voice” to our audiences long ago. How many media outlets can you think of that give the same time and space to both staff and reader commentaries? But now that we have been suitably chastened in the Internet era, have seen our hegemony more than a little dinged, I think we can look for more cohabitation of the media space – more equal dollops of media-produced content and audience-produced content side by side. And when it comes to the public conversation, media and audience are in it together, and who’s to say where one begins and the other leaves off? 

Time Management for Editors

What to leave in, what to leave out

(Originally written for the National Blog of the American Society of Business Publication Editors)

Editor consultant Howard Rauch’s finding that online projects have added at least eight days of work per editorial staff member really has struck home – not so much as revelation but as confirmation of what we’ve all been seeing for some time. I’ve worked in b2b media for more than two decades and I’d have to think hard to remember the last time my work focused exclusively on print. It may have been the mid 1990s.

I empathize with all editors these days – the job is more challenging than ever. Try though you might, you can’t do everything, and you can’t keep adding hours to your day until you’re burned to a crisp. This is true in print but even more so in digital media, where cheap and nearly limitless server space and nearly infinite online options are the polar opposites of print’s set folio sizes and start-the-press finality.

I’m no major Bob Seger fan but a lyric of his keeps coming to mind: “Deadlines and commitments / what to leave in, what to leave out.” If you feel like you’re perpetually “against the wind,” take a step back and reconsider your priorities. Here are a few suggestions:

Establish a practical ratio of how much time you should be spending on print, on emedia, and on events. Then stick to it. An example: “On the whole I’m going to devote 70% of my time on the magazine, 20% to emedia/social media, and 10% to events.” Get agreement on this pie chart of time from your lead editor, your publisher, or whoever has ultimate control of your time. There will be peaks and valleys in time spent in various areas, of course, but over a month or two keep tabs on your time and see if you’re sticking to the plan. For instance, under this scenario, in a 40-hour work week an editor would spend about 3.5 days per week on the magazine. If actual time spent keeps peaking past that goal, either the overall ratio is not workable (in which case the editor needs to talk to his or her superiors) or it’s time to start proverbially “working smarter, not harder” on the magazine. And that leads to another tip …

Jettison legacy advertising sections in print that no longer attract advertising. You know those topics that somehow manage to survive from editorial calendar to editorial calendar? If as an editor you feel those topics are no longer worthy of coverage, ask your publisher how many ad pages the section has attracted over the past few years. If the answer is none or very little, consider letting them slip silently into the darkness.

Take a similar approach to editorial surveys. If certain types of coverage score low on the question of “this is valuable to me in running my business” – and by “low” I mean it appeals to less than, say, a quarter or less of your audience – I would consider killing them.

Drop any story that won’t have gainful coverage in both print and online. If it’s a print story in development, break off a piece of it – a handful of great quotes, a stray but salient observation – for quick-hit online coverage. If it’s a late-breaking news story for online, pursue it only if it’s worthy of deeper analysis in print. If it’s not worthy of deeper follow-up coverage, it’s probably not of much interest to your audience anyway.

Are you mining your magazine’s event(s) as a trove of coverage – print and online? If you’re not … why not? You’re leaving on the table hours of exclusive live coverage that your competitor is probably not going to touch. And if you’re short of manpower to both produce and cover the meeting, hire a freelancer to cover some of the sessions for you. Who better to make the final edits than you?

Ditto for video. Why should a story remain just in video and not in print? Take the transcripts of video interviews you’ve conducted and convert them into print and/or web stories. And don’t forget to promote links among them. Different people like consuming information in different ways.

Stop producing video/audio pieces that aren’t generating a respectable number of views. What’s a “respectable amount” of views? Your call. But here’s a suggestion: Would you be disappointed to develop an in-person industry presentation that only 10 or 20 people heard? Of course it would depend on who heard it. But is video really that different? Set a target for number of views of a video for the first month or two it’s posted, and do your best to promote it. At least 50, 75 or 100 views in a month in most b2b markets where video still is being adopted would seem to be a good starting point. If you end up falling short of your goal, analyze and rethink – maybe even jettison – certain video projects, and focus on topics you know are predictable barnburners with your audience. Quality usually is better than quantity.

When in doubt as you conduct editorial planning, hold a project to these criteria:

1. Is it exclusive to my media brand?
2. Is it known to have generated concrete audience interest in the past (letters, comments, requests for reprints, more pageviews online, etc.)?
3. Would the audience be decisively poorer for not having learned this information?
4. Does it generate demonstrable interest in the advertiser community?
5. If you don’t have a decisive and honest yes to the any of the above – let the project go.

Don’t be a martyr. I’ve discussed the topic of time management with a lot of editors. Typically a problem with getting it all done arises as much if not more from a desire to do a job well as from lack of prioritization and organization. But don’t be a martyr. Burned-out editors are not good for their employers, their audiences, their friends and families, or themselves.

Pre-Roll Ads Are On a Roll

Pre-roll video ads now account for a significant share of all online video advertising

It’s an inevitable outgrowth of Web 2.0 and points the way to Web 3.0: Online video is big and getting bigger – projected by eMarketer to reach 77% of all Internet users and account for 15% of all online advertising spending in three years. Some estimates have pegged pre-roll ads as accounting for 90%+ of all video advertising already.

For an advertiser pressing into this new frontier, determining ideal length of a pre-roll ad can be a quandary. Research has shown that longer ads, of 30 seconds or more, run a higher risk of encouraging a would-be viewer to closing out of the player before the program even has begun. For example, Yume estimates the completion rate of a 30-second pre-roll video ad is 64% vs. 77% for an ad that is only 15 seconds.

However, there is a trade-off. The average click-through rate of a 15-second ad is 1.2%, Yume says, but 1.8% for a 30-second ad. Further, studies have shown that viewer recollection of ad content increases in proportion to the length of the ad.

At Meister Media, where we’re just beginning production of pre-roll video ads using our Studio M, we’ve found something of a comfortable compromise at 20 seconds. Here's one of our first pre-rolls, written and produced completely in-house for chemical and seed company DuPont Crop Protection and just recently posted to Meister’s website GrowingProduce.com.

Web Prophecy: 10 Years Later

What was right, what was wrong?

The rise and fall of high-tech stocks. Bush v. Gore. And just a few months off...Dubya’s brush-clearing and a little thing called 9/11. The year 2000 seems like ages ago. In Internet time it’s ancient history.

Yet so much from then is relatively the same. In the autumn of 2000 I attended a “Publishing on the Web” seminar then put on by Stanford University (now organized by Yale University) amid widespread loss of faith in the Internet after years of high-tech stock overvaluation. Predictions about the future of the online realm thundered from the podium – a few dire, but nearly all optimistic. As I pore over my tattered notes a decade later, it seems the "POtW" crowd was pretty prescient on the whole.

So, what was right? And what was wrong? Ten years down the line, here’s a rundown.

What Was Right

More portable/mobile devices. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said it best in the summer of 2009: “The smartphone market is really in its infancy. We’ll look back in five years and say, whoa, this is a market that’s tripled or quadrupled.” A prediction in MIN has said mobile will overtake web in three years – 2013.

The Internet will be “always on.” Say what? Of course the Internet is “always on.” But it sure didn’t feel that way back in 2000, when only 5% of the Internet audience had DSL/high-speed while the other 95% of us listened daily to the dial-up symphony: "Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do….beeeeeeeeeeep……screeeeeeeech….”

There will be more attitude, more opinion. This prediction has come true in spades, in the mainstream media and especially online, where social networks and the blogosphere have become veritable Towers of Babel.

There will be more talking to each other, through chat and email. I have only four words of response: “Face” and “Book” and “Linked” and “In.”

More engagement through audio and video. Two more words: “You” and “Tube.”

Newspapers will be in deep trouble with the next generation. According to the April 2000 edition of Online Journalism Review, fifty-nine percent of 18- to 24-year-olds then preferred the Internet. Most newspapers probably would kill for that ratio today. Today’s college-aged kids almost certainly like paper even less – an 80/20, or even 90/10, split in favor of online is certainly likely. See a previous blog post about this very topic.

“Leads are e-commerce.” Amen. Ten years down the road, many b2b media companies are still just catching on to their brands’ value in lead generation – arguably the biggest thing they have going for them – while more advertisers appreciate inbound traffic and requests for more information as worth their weight in gold. 

“Click-through rate is only one measure of performance. It’s not the number of clicks – it’s who clicks, and what they do post-click.” Exactly! Yet here we are, a decade older and still laboring to convince so many advertisers that by clicks alone shall an online ad campaign not be measured. The Online Publishers Association talks about the 80/20 rule: 20% of web users account for 80% of clicks, and most of those clickers are disproportionately younger and lower-income. Furthermore, as Publishing Executive has pointed out in talking about “delayed” clicks, the road to an advertiser’s website is not always direct.

“Keep an eye on Amazon.com – they’re the most aggressive in updating their site to customer needs.” With a market valuation exceeding all brick-and-mortar retailers but Walmart, I’d say Amazon has succeeded.

What Was Wrong

“The amount of free content will flatten or decrease in the next few years. We have to figure out a way to get subscribers to pay.” Unfortunately for all of us in media outside of a handful of outfits like the Wall Street Journal, this sadly has not been the case. Heck, even the release of the iPad has not significantly goosed paid subscriptions. Can anyone explain to me why USA Today would choose to offer its iPad app for absolutely free? If I had a paid print subscription to “USA Hooray” I’d cancel it this very moment – not in favor of an iPad app necessarily, but in protest of the newspaper’s stupidity. If a consumer publication is not going to get its audience to pay for content now, while tablet computers are fresh and new, it never will.

Getting Internet advertisers to pay 20-30 times more for audio lead-in ads than for banners. This initial burst of largesse among advertisers probably was due as much as anything to novelty and an early infatuation with multimedia. Today many video/audio ads are fighting for the same CPMs as banner ads, maybe a few magnitudes higher if they can get it. And besides, who outside of radio outfits like NPR focus on “audio” alone when video generally can ride right alongside it? 

“No one has ever stolen a credit card number on the Internet.” Ah, how we can now long for such Internet utopianism! A mere 18 or so months after the conference, the New York Times ran a headline reading: “Credit Card Theft is Thriving Online as Global Market.”

“Web access is very expensive in Japan.” Japan!! Listen, we’d all move to Japan in a heartbeat if web access were our sole criteria for residency. At $26 per month, Japan now has the lowest price for DSL service. The U.S., by contrast, ranks #13 in average price per connection, according to DSL Reports. Which only goes to show that "we can send a man to the moon, but…”

Server Farms

Are they the next sexy app?

Can we all agree? Online media's growth will be hampered as long as the United States far lags most other developed countries in bandwidth, YouTube videos sputter to a halt 30 seconds in, and Twitter frequently (too frequently) serves up pages like these:

(Though to their credit, Twitter has issued several mea culpas.)

PPT: 10 Trends That Could Make (or Break) Our Editorial Careers

From an April 29, 2010, webinar for the American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE). Based on a previous blog post.

Print Empire Strikes Back

Nice campaign – but is it too late?

I'm all for an ad campaign launched a few months ago by the Magazine Publishers of America called “Magazines: The Power of Print.” The campaign’s content strikes a correct balance between rightful wariness of the growing power of online media and a confident assertion of print’s unique characteristics.

But as a former magazine editor now tending an emedia incubator that’s being financed largely with print dollars, I nonetheless have to wonder: How much bigger of an impact could this campaign have had 10 or 15 years ago when prognostications of print’s pending demise were first voiced? We may have been able to blunt the oversimplified question of whether print was going to (a) die, or (b) continue sailing along on its merry way. The correct answer of course is (c) neither. As the MPA ad correctly notes, “a new medium doesn’t necessarily displace an existing one.” This is a historically proven fact; but for a decade or more we dithered on a polarized and ultimately unanswerable question when we could have been asking how print was going to evolve. And to be honest: we as magazine publishers still haven't answered that question.

Kudos to MPA for humbly beseeching their audiences to allow online media to peacefully coexist with their print products. But one statistic cited in the ad may be a bit misleading: “The appeal of magazines is growing…During the 12-year life of Google, magazine readership actually increased 11%.” Unspoken is the fact that the U.S. population actually increased by 14% over the same period, suggesting that even with an all-time-high ratio of college-educated Americans, print's historic demographic sweet spot, magazines actually are losing ground, or are at best treading water.

But that’s okay. I’ve held for some time that print content will grow the premium route. And when you go the premium route, quality of your audience matters more than quantity.

10 eMedia Tips for Marketers

. . . based on the most visible trends in online marketing – consumer and B2B

(Adapted from a webinar for Meister Media Worldwide advertisers)

The future of online marketing is wide open but is undisputed, and enough dust has settled in business-to-business markets to see what really works. Here are our top 10 emedia tips for B2B marketers interested in crafting highly effective campaigns for horticultural and agricultural markets. 

#1. Horticultural and agricultural audiences are now online or will be very soon.

A threshold has been passed: broadband use has reached a majority for rural households with an income of $50,000+. The higher the income, the higher the incidence of broadband: nearly 80% among rural incomes of $150,000+. With the FCC urging faster, wider broadband Internet access (March 2010) and the Internet becoming commonplace, the trend line will only continue to go up.

#2. eMedia has an accessible price point – and a nice ROI.

Respondents to a FOLIO: magazine survey on why clients buy emedia (May 2009) identified seven reasons: ROI/measurability/deeper business intelligence, lead generation, accessible price point, ability to interact with prospects, drive traffic to websites, interactive capabilities, and multimedia capabilities. Conducting apples-to-apples comparisons of print, enewsletters and web using traditional cost-per-impression formulas (see below) often shows emedia to be highly competitive.

#3. eMedia and Print work well together.

Print magazines drive awareness. eMail and websites drive action – clicks to websites, registrations, etc. A cross-platform pull creates market torque, with the total effect exceeding the sum of the parts.

#4. A webinar is a full campaign – not a one-off event. 

Webinars – live, then on-demand for three months afterwards – bring plenty of benefits in and of themselves including an engaging platform, quality time spent (an average of 45 minutes), and measurable ROI via detailed reporting. But a full webinar campaign can produce tens of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of impressions through pre- and post-webinar print ads, print articles, eblasts, enews ads, enews articles, and website banners. At a typical sponsorship fee (often starting at $9500), a webinar can generate a cost per impression as low as $.20 and an email lead for an industry-standard cost of about $30.

#5. Clicks are at best a partial test of a campaign’s success. 

Campaigns geared to generating awareness tend to emphasize impressions. Campaigns designed to drive action focus on clicks. It’s best to clarify expectations upfront. The click-through rate of a campaign should be viewed in the context of the industry average of .1 to .2%. About two-thirds of web users don’t click ads at all. Many others receive an impression and eventually initiate a “delayed click” – e.g., searching for the product brand or company or typing a URL directly into a browser, then making a later, untracked visit to an advertiser’s site. Bottom line: Impressions still are very important, and your website may be receiving more traffic from ads than is immediately measurable.

#6. Ad creative matters – unit size and content. 

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, medium rectangles attract the highest click-through rate of any ad unit (.37%), followed by leaderboards, skyscrapers, wide skyscrapers, and horizontal banners. These numbers are not absolute, though, and can vary greatly by site. Ask a sales rep or ad-ops person which units tend to perform best on a particular site. Among design considerations, using a billboard approach to graphics and always including a distinct call to action (e.g., “Watch,” “Order”) have become best practices. Adding animation and video increases the odds of drawing clicks.

#7. Position an incentive and a funnel on the other side of the click. 

As in trade show marketing and direct mail, online marketers should provide incentives for viewers to click and register – e.g., technical/white papers, informational webinars, calculators, coupons and discounts, a call from a sales or tech rep, etc. And be sure to be set up to capture at least an email address, which enables you to follow-up and potentially pick up more demographic information in increasing increments (name, title, company) using “progressive profiling.”

#8. Everything can and will be measured. 

Any emedia campaign should generate, at a minimum, ongoing reports of how ads are performing in terms of impressions and click-through rates. Armed with this information, marketers can analyze performance, evaluate it in the context of industry standards, and optimize the campaign through changes in ad content, unit size and location, ease of registration, etc.

#9. Online video is in every marketer’s future. 

The number of online videos viewed more than doubled from December 2008 to December 2009 and has surpassed 33 billion. Significant viewer growth is happening in the “long tail” – on smaller websites with far less traffic than video giants YouTube and Hulu. Video advertising is projected to be the fastest-growing online ad segment through at least 2014, with B2B a key part of the growth rate: Video-site traffic has increased the most among viewers age 30 to 49, with viewership of product-based videos on the web increasing 40% since 2007.

#10. Video/audio may be more accessible than you think. 

Video is best when it engages, demonstrates and entertains, often requiring little more than a solid video camera and knowledgeable expert who is comfortable in front of it. Custom-produced video can be time-intensive and is charged by the hour but it can have long legs: posted on advertiser and media websites, played on TVs at tradeshows, and distributed through sales reps. Develop a script and target a length of no more than 3-4 minutes. Pre-roll ads account for 95% of all online video advertising, with a length of :15 showing the best completion rate. There are many options in online video, but the key is to use banner ads and email to drive a higher number of total views.

10 Trends That Could Make (or Break) Our Editorial Careers

And none of them have anything to do with catching typos

(Originally written for the National Blog of the American Society of Business Publication Editors)

Rare is the opportunity to see the beginning of a new media platform, rarer still to be in a position to help shape it. Yet in the digital age this is the fortuitous place that we early 21st-century journalists occupy. As with the pioneers of television, many of the approaches we take today to online media will no doubt be refined over time but they also will help to define this completely new way to view and describe the world.

This portends great things for B2B editors and writers, and especially for those who can retain their journalistic backbone while shaping a whole new outer identity. Like early TV journalists trained in radio who first merely read the news to the eye of the camera before discovering television’s potential for visuals, we must put aside our own print assumptions and adapt the online medium as a new and unprecedented means of multiplatform communication and interaction.

Here, in no particular order, are 10 trends – currently in various stages of adoption – that have the potential to make or break our editorial careers, depending on how well we adapt.

1. We will be measured. Gone are the days when we as print journalists could proclaim an article a success if we received a handful of favorable calls and letters or emails. Today the online brand with the most opens, unique visitors and pageviews wins. And this will be true for individual writers and articles as well. Audience response is not everything – there always will be room for the important story that absolutely must be published – but metrics increasingly will be how the money people keep score.

2. Our content will become “co-creative” with our audiences’. That is, we’re going to share more and more of the authorship of our media products with the people who consume them. Article comments and online polls have been joined by sparks of dense, peer-to-peer interactions in online communities and growing numbers of blogs by industry experts – natural descendants to magazine columns. Coming now or soon: far more audience-supplied text, images and video, which itself will spin off more audience interaction. And how long will it be before our B2B sites begin true crowdsourcing – issuing “open calls” for collective, problem-solving contributions from our communities? B2B media historically has published articles identifying pressing industry challenges; now we can become instrumental in their very resolution.

3. Editorial-produced content will focus predominantly on analysis and exclusives. I think we’re in the middle of a long-term decline in the need for what used to be called “news of record.” Major company and people announcements, meeting news, and tradeshow coverage become commoditized when they hit everyone’s websites at the same time. Remember too that we’re not alone in using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. to follow the slipstream of daily developments. In the future we’ll spend less time and attention on non-exclusive news reporting and more of our efforts on (a) expert analysis of the meaning of and likely reverberations from breaking developments, and (b) editorial presentations that our brands alone are known for – rankings of companies and people, expert predictions, exclusive columns and blogs, etc. A deeper and more expert knowledge of our markets than often has been true in the past will be needed for us to do this.

4. We are in the entertainment – as well as information – business. B2B media historically has been resistant to much of the entertainment value of consumer media, but in an online realm where disparate worlds can and do collide, we may be at liberty – in fact, compelled – to discard some of our businesslike soberness in order to remain relevant. Some marketers already have discovered the great value of using humor in viral video, such as Blendtec and its faux-retro “Will It Blend?” series. Prediction: video and audio scriptwriting is in your future; in fact it already is reality in some corners of Meister Media where we recently constructed a video production studio. Likewise the very graphic presentation of B2B websites will evolve, as Flash and other forms of animation come to the editorial webpage as surely as consumer-like 4/c forms chased cover-to-cover b/w from our magazine pages. Editors increasingly will work with designers and web developers in “directing” animated presentations.

5. We (not publishers) will be the primary marketers of our own content. Posting our content, once the coda of our work, now is setting off a secondary step of “placing” links in social media; monitoring metrics; and modifying story angles, headlines, ledes, etc. in a gambit to reap more pageviews. Again, this duty will fall on the individual journalist as surely as the work of crafting the very story itself.

6. It’s nearly certain that no member of our audience is going to pay us or our publishers directly for our content. The Wall Street Journals of the world notwithstanding, the vast majority of the media will have little to no success turning around the deeply ingrained expectation of free content online. It’s been estimated that as few as 5% of online users will pay for digital news. As is the case with controlled circulation magazines, this reality will require editors to continue working with their publishers and their advertising community to attract commercial support that pays the freight.

 7. The fading “bright line” between editorial and sales may get even dimmer. Publishers and salespeople are as challenged by the transition to online as editors are, with the famed “print dollars to digital dimes” devolution reducing revenue and profit margins for many media outlets. Publishers need audience engagement like never before. Web metrics are like nonstop readership studies – they’re conducted year-round, year in and year out. In order to generate more pageviews and, hence, ad impressions, the editor’s creativity and knowledge of audience needs and behavior will be in even more demand, sometimes directly in the service of the advertiser. This is not necessarily a bad thing – in fact, it’s probably good for the longer-term employment prospects of the editor – but emerging discussions about online ethics are very timely, as the differentiation between editorial and advertising is not always as distinguishable online as it is in print.

8. In just a few years our content will be just as likely to be read on mobile devices as on desktop and computer screens. In fact, as I wrote this, a report in MIN predicted that mobile will overtake desktop web in three years. Text for smaller screens must be pithier, more useful on-the-go, and its development even faster – nearly instantaneous. Graphic images must be more workmanlike and immediately useful, less ornamental. And video played on handhelds is on the verge of a breakthrough.

9. Print content will go the premium route. In a web-first environment our online content often will be priority one on a day-to-day basis, but that doesn’t mean print will go by the wayside. In my view, print publications will be developed for a more select audience worthy of the additional costs of printing and distribution. To coexist in an online world, print content will need to improve overall and reassert its unique value. I envision a return to larger trim sizes, higher quality paper, and more lavish editorial and graphics – but again, for a more select audience, and likely at a less-than-monthly frequency.

10. The Millennials will want our content, but in different packages. I recently wrote in my emedia blog about my college-age daughter’s disinterest in newspapers. But a rejection of the medium doesn’t necessarily equate to a rejection of the content. Example: the Beatles are more popular now than they have been in years in part due to Rock Band’s popularity with the iGeneration. The Millennials of course will demand content that is relevant to their specific needs – a challenge for every generation of journalists – but what they consume must be served in a context that they like and are used to: far from reliant on paper; mobile (of course); entertaining and irreverent (think Nickelodeon, their cable channel of preference growing up); interactive (think Facebook); and customizable (think iGoogle).

As a media platform the web already has been around for 15 years or more, so isn’t it funny that we should still be talking about how to adapt our content for its uses? I don’t think so. The early 2010s for emedia are roughly analogous to the early 1960s for TV, which is to say: the infrastructure has been laid, the technological novelty (and intimidation) is wearing off, the audience is reaching a critical mass – and attention now turns to the quality and value of the contents that are pulsing through this pipeline rather than on the technical marvel of the pipeline itself. For anyone involved in the creation of content, it’s an adventurous time to be alive.

Print + eMedia = Results

You really can’t have one without the other

The other day I gave a presentation to Meister Media’s sales group in which I (understandably) advocated vigorously on behalf of digital advertising. At the heart of the session were numbers – numbers, numbers, numbers. How emedia is eminently measurable. How its cost-per-impression is extremely competitive with print. (And actually it’s often far lower.) How good emedia leads to clicks, and from there – if the total campaign is crafted well – how the click results in solid and relatively inexpensive sales leads for the client.

There was plenty of receptivity among the salesfolk to the emedia message, and really there has been for some time, as Meister’s digital revenue has been growing vigorously. But there’s also a natural reluctance to disparage print in favor of emedia, and as I took pains to say – there really doesn’t need to be. The two go hand in hand.

I use the metaphor of torque (see above). Individually, print magazines, enewsletters or websites will get you down the marketing road but maybe not as far or as fast as you would like. Put them together and 3+3+3 = 4. Print is a highly effective way to build awareness. eMedia drives action – traffic to websites, advertiser/prospect interaction, multimedia and measurability.

Is any of this revolutionary? Hardly. But we in the media business have wasted a good decade-and-a-half either declaring print dead or pronouncing its imperviousness to all new oncoming competitition. We’re all wrong! And we should stop polarizing the discussion. A friend who is a professor at Cleveland State University’s noted School of Communication recently pointed out that no new medium of the past 100 years has really gone away – radio slid over to make way for movie theaters, movie theaters for TV, TV for video games and the Internet, etc. And each evolved a new business model to coexist with its newfound competitor.

Print is now sliding over to make way for emedia, and both are going to evolve into something new as result. More later on what each likely is going to become on the other side of this transformation. But for now, the message is: Print and emedia – they’re each an important part of this nutritious media breakfast.

Web Analytics’ Unforgiving Eye

As the Fastball song goes: ‘There are no lies / when you see that look in their eyes’

Is there a more immediate and honest judgment of one’s work than live performances? I think not. To a rock band I once performed with, our running barometer of success was the ability to (a) get people in the door and (b) get them to respond – ideally by dancing and raising their arms (as below) and or at least standing or at least by smiling and rhythmic head-nodding. We would know minutes into the performance what type of night it was going to be.

Similarly visceral judgments await those of us who are migrating our content focus from print to web – getting people in, then keeping them in. Web analytics provide us with an immediate and unblinking judgment: Did or did not a significant portion of our intended audience look at our content or didn’t they? A glance at the pageview totals will say yea or nay. Did they stay for long? A low average-time-on-site and/or high bounce rate will say, nope.

As I wrote in an entry of the national blog for the American Society of Business Publication Editors, gone are the days when we as print journalists could proclaim an article a success if we received a handful of favorable calls and letters or emails. Today the online brand with the most opens, unique visitors and pageviews wins. And this will be true for individual writers and articles as well. Audience response is not everything – there always will be room for the important story that absolutely must be published – but metrics increasingly will be how the money people keep score.

As journalists we can win this game. We (not publishers) must become the primary marketers of our own content. Posting our content, once the coda of our work, now is setting off a secondary step of “placing” links in social media; monitoring metrics; and modifying story angles, headlines, ledes, etc. in a gambit to reap more pageviews. This duty is falling on the individual journalist as surely as the work of crafting the very story itself.

It's What's Inside that Counts

Let’s not worry so much about the media ‘container.’ It’s mostly about the content – what it is and how it’s used.

A personal vignette about old media and the next generation.

Last night Eldest Child was squired back to the campus of The Ohio State University for the beginning of her winter quarter and a trip to the bustling (Barnes & Noble) college bookstore. Girls in Uggs and boys in ballcaps – some of the best and brightest of the world’s first wired generation – glided agilely among coffeehouse scents and the bounty of twenty-first-century distractions.

Everybody in the store was in motion, save for one. Stationed strategically between the registers and the store’s exit was a lone, still sentinel – a middle-aged man on a stool, behind a small table festooned with two simple, Gothic-lettered words: “Columbus Dispatch.”

Would you like a discounted subscription to the paper?, the gentleman asked as my daughter slipped towards the store exit.

She smiled quickly and firmly, but with not a whit of deliberation between request and response.

No thanks, she said.

Back out on the street, Eldest Child, simpatico to my chosen profession, wanted to know why the newspaper just couldn’t have offered her something online – either the come-on, or the product itself.

Good question. If newspapers don’t gin up the right answers, and soon, a recent cartoon from Ted Rall (above) will be as prophetic as it is funny. For in the lobby of my daughter’s Honors College dormitory there are not discounted newspapers but FREE newspapers, all for the betterment (and hoped-for addiction) of tomorrow’s leaders, colorfully displayed in an all-you-can-read-for-nothing banquet of Columbus Dispatches, Cleveland Plain Dealers, New York Timeses, and USA Todays – and all about as untouched as Xbox 360 controllers in a senior citizens center.

Why must this be so? Are the Millennials just not as interested as the Baby Boomers or Gen Xers have been in news, in statistical information, in colorful life stories?

Hardly! The problem, I believe, is that the Internet generation just isn’t that wedded to paper. And as journalists, we shouldn’t be either. Which isn’t to say our content won’t need to evolve to suit the online medium. It will. And how we present our content online will be every bit as important as what content we choose to present. But we must resist the urge to equate the next generation’s rejection of the medium with a wholesale rejection of content itself.

I agree with an article written for the World Association of Newspapers that papers (and for that matter, print magazines) must become not just publications anymore but “valued members of larger networks that enable their communities to gather, share, and make sense of the news they need.” In fact, I recently talked about the long history of business media as “community” – that it’s more about the brand, the community, and the conversation than it is about the medium – at a meeting of the American Society of Business Publication Editors.

How will we conjure this new vision of mediated community? We need to put on our collective virtual reality helmet and – as Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab describes it – “imagine what media consumption will look like in one, five, 10 years.”

Which sounds like way more fun than pouting like rejected suitors, sitting on the fringes of the media ball and offering our phone number to anyone who happens by.

On the Other Side of the Click

Make sure you know where your ad is going – and what it's supposed to do.

Most emedia advertisers in business-to-business go to all the trouble of designing and placing display ads that virtually scream, “Notice Me!” and “Click Me!”

And then what?

More clickthroughs than I care to recount whisk the visitor to the advertiser’s home page – the online equivalent of driving a friend to the outskirts of your city or town but not all the way to your house. Why not link as deeply into your site as you can, ideally to the webpage for the product or service that the ad specifically talked about? It’s only good customer service. Otherwise we’re asking the customer to drive blindly through the digital backstreets on his or her own.

This direct-link approach should hold even if multiple products have been mentioned in an ad. One additional page on the landing site can tout all the options in that product family, with textual links taking the visitor to each discrete product or service page. For example: “Meister Media offers a wide variety of media for multiple markets, including Ornamentals and Fruits and Vegetables.”

Even better…why not reward visitors for making that voyage to the other side of the click, ideally in exchange for their email addresses? The best come-ons in b-to-b ads typically offer at least one of these three things:

• A freebie or discount
• Some type of premium such as a webinar or an informational ‘white paper’
• An interactive and informative widget (e.g., ‘estimate your monthly savings’)

Not only are such promises nearly certain to increase an ad’s clickthroughs, they also generate hard sales leads as well as customer satisfaction in being rewarded for clicking on your ad.

In short, a concrete and thoughtful plan for what happens on the other side of the click should be elemental to any online marketing strategy. Otherwise you’re like an old-fashioned direct-mail or print marketer with a general front-desk mailing address and no plan whatsoever for what to do with all the mail you get in response to your ad.