ChasNote

In a recent post on American Express’s Open Forum site, Battelle tells business owners who interact with their customers online: You no longer just selling widgets, you’re in the media business. The point is this, don’t define yourself by what you sell (”we sell trains!”) but rather the service you provide your customers (transportation services). American Express — the company that’s paying Battelle and other business authors to license their content — gets it. The Open Forum site isn’t about selling plastic debit cards, it’s about empowering their customers with tools to grow their businesses, plastic debit cards and insightful business content included.

Last fall (if not earlier), American Express recognized the importance of search equity, the status of its brand among the organic results from search engines. These results — the free ones, not the paid listings — are a proxy for the relevance and trust your brand has earned among its business ecosystem: customers, partners, the press and the peanut gallery. In other words, your brand’s position in search results reflects how active and successful you are in the conversation.

I say last fall because that’s when I first noticed American Express paying careful attention to the small-business authors and bloggers that rank highly on search results for SMB terms and phrases (including American Express trademarks), and making sure its ad messages surfaced on those high-influence sites.

Now American Express is making an even greater investment in its search equity, a greater commitment to having a voice within the small business conversation. It has partnered with top independent content creators covering small business — especially those authors who don’t merely create content but also use content to inspire a conversation — to produce the OPEN Forum Insight from Business Experts site.

Authors such as Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, Scott Belsky of Behance.net and John Battelle of Searchblog are contributing exclusive content to the site. No plugs for Amex OPEN Forum Events or Travel Services from these contributors, mind you, just insightful editorial features on the topics Anita, Scott and John cover at their own sites. Content that appeals, quite obviously, to their existing audiences, which opens the door to efficient marketing in two ways. One, American Express is running ads on each site that invite readers to read more from the authors they came to read in the first place. Ads for original content by top business authors, targeted to those authors’ loyal readers? Needless to say, click-through performance on these ads is vastly better than average.

Two, authors don’t want to publish content and then hide it from their core audiences, so American Express is benefiting from some unpaid (and un-asked-for) promotions, like this call-out by Anita Campbell to her own content at the OPEN Forum site.

When audiences follow their favorite authors to the OPEN Forum site, they arrive ready for a conversation. A week in and visitors have clicked on the “I find this post useful” button more than 100 times, and the commenters are out-pacing the contributors based on word counts. Engaged visitors tend to carry the conversation with them, too, even as they leave the site that started it. According to Technorati, 17 blogs are linking to this section of the OPEN Forum site, and there have been news pick-ups by aggregators such as I Want Media (on 2/22/08). As more sites “endorse” the conversation by linking to it, Digging it and Twittering it, Google will take notice, and American Express’s search equity will feel the juice. And the 1% rule of social media suggests that for every comment post and every trackback link published, there are 99 others who quietly found the content useful. Search equity is the tip of the social-media iceberg — a partial indicator of a much larger phenomenon.

Congratulations to the team that put this together: Steve Clark, Jason Ewell, Naama Ashkenazi Bloom, Amy Fitzgibbons and Lou Paskalis at American Express; Rachel Bogan, Lee Baler and Scott Cappuzzo at Digitas; and James Gross, Marcia Simmons, Matt Jessell and Teresa Nielsen Hayden at FM.

Disclosure: When Battelle isn’t writing Searchblog, he is FM’s CEO and my boss.

From NY Times:

“Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, said Tuesday the broadcaster was moving to save as much as $50 million a year by reducing its reliance on expensive pilots of new series on the NBC television channel.”

More evidence (like anyone needs it!) that the packaged-goods approach to media — where large media companies own and control distribution of content — is breaking down. As audiences move to the internet, the economic models behind television networks are becoming less lucrative. Fifty million dollars a year to throw programming-spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks just doesn’t pay out anymore.

From Media Week.

“Like much else in the digital world, Google stands at the center of this shift, Horan said. The ability to use search engines to find information means a more meritocratic media world, where a smaller advertiser or publisher can compete with larger companies on the basis of relevance. A car shopper, for instance, uses search to find information and considers a variety of sources rather than turn to a single trusted brand, he said. Intent-driven media also means a blurrier distinction among content, commerce and community, he said. As an example, Horan pointed to Nike+, the running system and social network that blend product, branding and service.”

I’m wondering if Horan read Battelle’s book.

From NY Times:

“In a posting Friday afternoon, Emily Gould, a Gawker editor, dropped the bomb: both she and Choire Sicha, the site’s top editor, were quitting. A third editor, Joshua David Stein, confirmed on Saturday that he was leaving, too. Gawker’s three remaining staff members were all hired within the last three months.”

More interesting to me is why:

“Ms. Gould, who has been with Gawker for a year, said she was upset about a new compensation system that pays writers according to how many times people view their blog posts rather than only by how many posts they write. The system, she said, pits writers against one another. ‘It really gets in your head in this weird way because you’re getting so conscious of how many people are reading what,’ Ms. Gould said. ‘You get focused on being sensational and even more brain candyish than Gawker was to start with.’”

Here, for example, is the image that usually accompanies coverage of rumors related to FM — FM’s founder and CEO, John Battelle, giving the Battelle Salute, taken sometime in the late 1990s:

Battelle articulates what more and more marketers are coming to realize, that brand advertising investments aren’t just driving perception shift in a vacuum that must be measured by pre and post research; those dollars are informing search behavior. Nor should search-engine marketing be the express domain of direct-response advertising, since search-engine results pages are, after all, where most of our customers first experience our brands online (see Searchblog).

The two are linked, and the links are becoming more obvious. Here, for example, is the results page on Google for a trademarked phrase owned by Mitsubishi, “lancer evolution.” Battelle marked with red arrows the two links (one paid, one organic) that point to Mitsubishi; the rest of this Lancer Evolution “brand experience” falls outside of Mitsubishi’s control.

Here’s what Battelle’s hearing from marketers of late:

“First, they are noticing that when they run brand advertising both online and off, searches for their brands increase. Second, they are noticing that when searches for their brands increase, sales (or at least valuable, measureable leads) follow. And they certainly want searches for their brands to increase. But they have noticed something else as well: There’s a lot of stuff that comes up when folks search for their brands that they don’t control. In particular, there’s a ton of messaging out there — the equivalent of brand advertising, in a sense — that reflects the world’s view of their brand….

“In short, there are a lot of conversations out there that marketers can’t ‘control,’ but that are vital to the brand’s perception, consideration, and performance.”

Here are Google results for American Express-owned trademark “plum card” from September 18, not long after they launched the new card by that name.