For the past few years, journalists from traditional media have been shocked and horrified at every new model (or suggestion of a model) that would reward content creators based on pageviews or ratings or copies sold. The outrage! A vulgar popularity contest!
Seth Godin joined the fray this week by suggesting that everyone — journalists included — should be compensated on a commission basis, like salespeople. Godin’s readers know that he tends to exaggerate his points for effect, and I’m sure this week’s post is no exception. But the point (in some less hyperbolic iteration) is a very good one. If you look at pageviews or ratings or copies sold as measures of consumer satisfaction, rather than vulgar popularity contests, Godin’s suggestion makes sense, and isn’t actually that new. Doing a good job matters. Executives at media companies — the publishers, the presidents, the editors in chief, the directors of circulation — have always been evaluated based on that kind of “consumer satisfaction.” As readers flock to competitive publications, top brass at the shrinking-popularity publication lose their jobs. That’s why serious magazines often opt for sensational cover designs.
Raw popularity, though, isn’t the best way to measure quality. Us Weekly will always be more popular than the New York Review of Books. But popularity among your universe of prospective readers — the wide net of people who like celebrities, or the narrow net of people who like literary books — is a fair measure of the quality of your organization’s work.
The tricky part is isolating the quality of one individual’s work from the organization as a whole. A great journalist teamed up with a lousy circulation person isn’t likely to hit his or her readership goals, just like a great salesperson who is teamed up with an incompetent ad operations person isn’t likely to collect his or her full commission, no matter how good s/he is at selling.
I love the commission model; it creates urgency and accountability — both of which are far more productive than whining about bloggers and the proliferation of free news on the internet. (Or newspaper bailouts, for crying out loud.) But let’s be sure any commission model for journalists is sophisticated enough to reward (or penalize) the results that journalists have control over.
Seth Godin’s predictions about printed newspapers and traditional advertising do an interesting thing. By declaring that these business models have lost their relevance (forget about whether or not the exact dates are right), he forces you to think past the distraction of collapsing quarterly revenues. We all know how it will end, eventually. So start thinking about _why_ these models have lost their ability to support businesses: They’re not working for consumers. Focus on them and the rest will work itself out.
“Prediction: there will be no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US by 2012. So, you’ve got two and a half years before the newspaper industry is going to be doing something else with the news and the ads, or not be there at all. Does that change what you do today if you work in this business?”
“Prediction: 90% of your sales will come from word of mouth or digital promotion by 2011. How do you change what you’re doing today to be ready for that?”The Last Seduction movie download
“Not powder or chemicals or rubber or steel or silicon or talk or installations or even sugary water. What marketers sell is hope. The reason is simple: people need more. We run out. We need it replenished. Hope is almost always in short supply.”
Exactly. Watch how Mad Men’s Don Draper sells the Kodak client on his idea to help them sell the Carousel — give your customers hope that the new thing will soothe the ache of nostalgia:
I agree with Godin that traditional advertising doesn’t and won’t work in Facebook or Twitter. Operative word: traditional. But I don’t agree that Twitter and Facebook — just because they’re designed for connecting communities rather than distributing traditional media content — won’t devise native experiences that will work well for their communities and for brand marketers at the same time.
Brand marketing doesn’t need to operate like “traditional advertising.” For example, with its OPEN Forum blog, American Express is using marketing dollars to create a credible small business publication, replete with editorial contributions from the leading names in business advice. Based on repeat visitor rates and links from other sites that recommend it to their readers, the SMB community is finding value in the OPEN Forum blog even though its content is funded by ad dollars. And because the contributors to the site, such as Guy Kawasaki and Anita Campbell, are given license to create real, editorial content (they wouldn’t participate otherwise), they’re alerting their Twitter followers each time they post something new. They are not paid to post these stories to Twitter; they’re doing it because they always Twitter new stuff they publish, whether the content appears on their own sites or at someone else’s publication.
I’d argue that American Express is using Twitter for brand marketing right now, and it’s working as well for Guy’s and Anita’s followers as it is for American Express.
Certain applications within Facebook, like Graffiti, have done the same: Developing ad-supported experiences that allow brands to enter the conversation without spoiling the conversation. Here are some exmples.
(Disclosure of sorts: Seth Godin is not officially affiliated with FM, unless you count our informal Seth Godin Fan Club. He is, however, a sometime contributor to the OPEN Forum site, the content of which FM manages.)
Seth Godin has an odd — though perhaps too common — encounter with the robots that are building ad networks all over the internet. The robots in question, in this case, are employed by Forbes.
“A woman named Jennifer Rosini at Forbes sent a note that read:
Hi , You are invited to join the new community of the high quality business and financial bloggers from Forbes.com. Our community – the Business and Financial Blog Network, will launch shortly.
“I wrote her back, pointing out that she hadn’t even bothered to pretend it was a personal note… just a mail merge missing my name.
“She responded (this is the entire note):
I’m not sending these out. I have people working for me that send out 500 a day. Are you interested in joining, Seth?
“The juxtaposition of the third sentence with the second just highlighted the inanity of the entire enterprise. It’s a high-quality network, but 500 people a day are being asked to join, and it’s okay to spam people but do I want to join anyway?”
“The end result of spam (email spam, blog spam, Twitter spam, Squidoo spam, comment spam, phone spam, politician spam) is that it eats away at your brand. If you don’t have a brand, you might make some short term cash but it gets tiresome creating annoyance everywhere you go. If you do have a brand, a brand like Forbes, say, you don’t notice the brand erosion… until it’s too late.”
Needless to say, brand marketers don’t want to be associated with distressed brands — so what’s the point of this approach?
“Sure, 1% of your customers blog or post or just plain talk. They’re louder than ever before. But the other 99% represent a real opportunity for you. Figure out how to get them out there. Cajole them to go to a caucus.”
I know it worked for Obama yesterday — get of them to caucus — but that might be the harder path, getting your quiet fans to alter their personalities so they become talkative fans. An alternative suggestion: Find talkative folks, and see if you can deliver a noteworthy experience with your brand.
“Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly. A lousy flight on United Airlines is word of mouth. A great meal at Momofuku is word of mouth.
“Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else. (They can help by making it easier for the word to spread, but in the classic examples, the marketer is out of the loop.) The Mona Lisa is an ideavirus.”
