The Marketing Plaza

Content is king, but too much content can be like too much e-mail- spam.  The key is to provide content of value and in enough quantity that it can be digested.

Recently I was at a newspaper conference where we evaluated how well various papers were engaging in the social media world. The irony is that no one has better or more content than newspapers – so much so that many tweets, Facebook posts and blogs take you to various newspaper stories around the country.   So what are newspapers doing wrong?

I think it comes down to two key things:

1. They provide too much content. A news stream is almost like a wire service firing off story after story until hundreds of stories are posted almost within the hour that the news has gone to press.  As a reader, I’d much prefer perhaps one story an hour, or the story of the day, or the story that’s the funkiest, or even a story from the food section, rather than every story being printed in the main section that day.

2. They are too automated.  Precisely because they have so much content, and because they won’t invest in staff or resources to enter the online arena, the newspapers I’ve seen have automated the process.  Too much of any good thing is too much, and the same is true of automation.

I follow social media sites to get the best ideas a business or marketing guru has to offer. I don’t want every line from every book, or every chapter capsulized.  I want a tidbit for the day that I can remember, think about and take with me on my own business travels.  I also follow a person because of the personal touch.

When the tweets put out by a paper are so highly automated that they have no humor, no irony, no personal touch—well, then I might as well be following CNN.  Even if the news is local, I want some sense that a person has decided to put this particular news item out on the internet because it’s special and not just one item out of a thousand for the day.

Social media is best done consistently and regularly, but is not better served by being over served.  Ironically as newspapers moan that their copy is being stolen for free by the Googles of the world, they have entered the social media arena without editing themselves.  And, editing is their strength!

Yes, give some content for free, but learn the art of the tease.  Stop flooding the market with all the news all the time.  Go back to the art of the headline and tell me what’s most important, most humorous, most worthwhile for today rather than flooding me with everything. It’s just too much information.

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In the social media world people like to talk about interactive two-way information, but I believe the analogy is limited.  Information is like water.  It flows downstream. Through a strong eco-system that includes evaporation and precipitation, water returns to rivers and streams to reflow.  Information is the same.

Instead of the proverbial two-way arrow presented in so many social media seminars, I see info flow as more circular. I see it flowing downstream from a blogger to the world, then sprinkled out through Tweets and e-mail, blown through the Internet  clouds through link-backs and retweets, filtered through feedback and comments, and only then refined back to the writer for reconsideration.

In the marketing world, we call it  “getting the message out.”  In today’s society, getting out a message is considered a somewhat ‘interruptive” outdated concept, but is it?  The bottom line is that communication starts with sending out a message.

Study after study in the newspaper world showed readers valued the ads as much if not more than the news.  Considered classic interruptive advertising, these newspaper ads had defined, measurable value to the very people they were designed to reach.

In this new social media world, not as much has changed as people would have you believe. People like communities. People like communication. People like to be listened to and valued.  In return, they may prefer you as vendor, product, relationship or brand. Or, they may not.  Yet, it still all begins with communication.

Hence, those companies who have stopped marketing due to the recession, are truly in for a longer drought than those who continue to outpour thoughts, ideas and ongoing communications with prospective partners, stakeholders and customers. The thought economy is like any other. It requires transactions that begin with someone wanting to impart or part with something and someone else willing to access it.

In today’s social media economy, make sure to water your thoughts.  Send them downstream, have patience and continue watering.  Flowers will bloom as well as business, relationships, and expanded thinking.

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The name of today’s marketing warfare game is Search and Be Found. It’s counter-intuitive to those of us brought up on the old game Battleship, where the goal was not to be found while you uncovered and destroyed your opponent’s ship. The game was based on the Cold War mentality that subterfuge keeps you alive; being open about where you are will get you sunk.

Fast forward to today’s world. Marketing Warfare is very different from Battlefield War Tactics.  Your primary guru should  no longer  be Sun Tzu, author of  The Art of War,  but perhaps Chris Anderson, Seth Godin, or even wine merchant Gary Vaynerchuk.  Google them.  Then, Google something about your company.  Can you be easily found?

In the military, camouflage is still an important and vital tactic.  In marketing, tactics have changed. It’s not about boldly going where no one has before — although that’s not bad.  It’s about bolding letting everyone know where you are from being found to being found frequently and being found whenever the consumer chooses to seek you out — not just during the hours you happen to be open. The web world no longer supplements, but leads all other marketing efforts. Find the new warfare gurus and learn from them … fast.

So why are so many companies so far behind in the web arena? Ironically, the more entrenched a company is either with a strong IT department, politically timid (meaning has a board of directors), or is from an industry that is trained to be close-lipped (read legal and health), the more likely it is behind the times in web marketing.

Here’s a case in point: This week an associate wrote me to to ask why a local newspaper never showed up on Google alerts about a famous and well-known local politician. Certainly the newspaper had more news items online about the politician than any other site except perhaps the politician’s own web site. The answer likely lies in many places – keywords, page branding, site mapping – but one place, for sure, is the IT (Information Technology) department.

Assumption: Many companies, newspapers included, still believe that everthing computer-related belongs with the IT department — web sites among them. Wrong.

Truth: Web sites belong with the marketing department.  Why?  For one reason — only marketing people care about Search and SEO.  And here’s the real conundrum – SEO is largely a programming function, but a function that even though technical should report to marketing.  It is not an operational concern, but a marketing issue. The website can run without it, and run well from an operational standpoint.  It’s just that no one will ever find it — failure from a marketing perspective.

IT people are trained to keep people out — from hackers to hucksters.  Marketing people and the web are geared to let people in.  If you want a web site that gets you listed, lets you get found, and is invites participation, think long and hard about who controls your website.  If it’s your IT department, you have a problem.

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Newspapers are crashing and burning. I’m not talking about in their own medium — although there’s sad news on that front.  No, I mean in the social media world.  Why?  Because they refuse to modify their message to the medium. It’s an odd commentary for a medium built solidly in the communications world, but one thing newspaper publishers, editors and writers don’t understand is how to use a blog to their best advantage (not to mention Twitter and other social media).

Publishers. Publishers care about publishing. They want the funds to print another day.  Hence, they are concerned with revenue.  Guess what? Blogs are not great revenue producers — at least at first — and publishers are not patient people. They want the ads in today for tomorrow’s edition.  The result?  They are looking for posts that will bring in advertisers. They keep trying to develop content that the Advertising department can sell, rather than content the community wants to read or engage in.  It’s not a good model and it hasn’t worked.

Editors. Editors are a bit better, but also don’t understand the medium.  Great editors understand the need for personality and the public thirst for the news behind the news.  One of my favorite Sunday columns was a local editor’s post on how his reporters got the latest, greatest story — literally the story behind the news. However, the insights were saved for the precious Sunday paper and not posted on the paper’s website.

Another young editor at a different local paper, started a community blog. She inherently understood the need for community voice on the paper’s website, but didn’t understand that community in the blogging world means individuals not organizations.  She approached non-profits in the State with the opportunity to post on a blog set up for local causes. The result is a series of mini-press releases on golf outings and benefactor and grant news rather than insights into the causes.  I can guarantee you that the only people reading the blog are the marketing folks at other non-profits.  The real community isn’t interested.

Writers. Writers understand writing and followings, but newspaper writers are in competition with themselves. They are saving their stories for the paper, hoping to get in the Sunday edition. Their blog posts are bland and again, tend not to tell the story behind the story.  Why was it a difficult story to write?  How did they get a crying mother to admit her son had gone sour? How did they learn about the story in the first place?  Don’t just tell me you wrote a great story. Tell me why you felt it was worthy of the newspaper. Then, you might draw me to your story in the paper, but mostly, I’m not going to bother to read your current blog. It’s not giving me any insight into your craft.

Newspapers are built for blogging.  They just haven’t realized it yet, or approached it in the right way. I wish they would. I’m a news junkie at heart and would eat it up — as would a huge segment of the online world.

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