Paul Gillin, the U.S. social media observer, consultant and writer -and author the one of the most acclaimed early books exploring the social media boom The New Influencers (link to www.paulgillin.com)- is a featured presenter at the Infopresse/ In:fluencia Digital Internet Marketing Conference, May 15 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

I recently spoke with Gillin about how blogs, podcasts and social networking communities are creating new centers of influence -and big new challenges and opportunities for companies looking to connect with consumers.

The full conversation can be heard here. Some highlights:

Q: Who is doing the good stuff in social media? Who should we be copying these days?

 Well there are so many different kinds of social media. There are blogs, which have been popular for about four or five years, and are the most mature form of social media. There are some excellent examples there. I think Southwest Airlines does a wonderful job. Dell is very effective in blogging. The Google blog is outstanding. Kodak has just appointed an official Kodak blogger- that’s what they do full time- and they’re doing some very interesting things. There are about 60 or 70 major corporations that are doing some kind of blogging work right now.

In social networking -the Facebook, Myspace domain-it’s fairly new still.  I think Victoria’s Secret on Facebook has done a very nice job. Southwest Airlines –again- on Facebook has a very well done presence.

There are some companies that are doing their own captive sort of gated social networks, where they are bringing enthusiasts together. I would point to Nikon and what it doing on the photo sharing site Flickr.  Nikon has very effectively engaged those photo enthusiasts and brought them into a kind of community of Nikon customers. I think they’ve done a wonderful job with that.

And actually there are many excellent examples of what Procter & Gamble is doing here. There’s one called BeingGirl.com which is for teenage girls and has a very active audience. There’s another one, there’s a program they’re doing right now based on their talking stain commercial from the Super Bowl, where it’s a video contest where people are being asked to create their own videos of the talking stain. And that’s worked out very well.

Q:  Are there companies you can name that are going where you shouldn’t go?

Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is an amazing company that does so many things right­. But in social media it has for some reason just tripped over its feet repeatedly, through fakery.  They’re using social media tools but disguising what they are trying to do with them. They were trying to look like something they weren’t.  And this has happened a couple of times with Wal-Mart now and it’s very kind of painful to watch the embarrassment they’ve gone through.

Sony has had the same problem. Their technique called flogging –or fake blogging- has bitten them. Sony also was a victim of an early blog attack about three years ago over some spyware that was embedded in its music CDS. It took them a very long time to respond to the charges that were leveled by a very prominent blogger and they just looked worse and worse the longer they waited.

Those are a couple of notable companies. But frankly, big embarrassments have been rare. For the most part you can get away with a lot right now because everyone knows it’s a new medium and if you stub your toe people are pretty forgiving.

Q: Where does responsibility for social media reside in the company and their agency partners? Is this a PR function? Is it a traditional marketing function? Should the C-suite be involved?

That question comes up all the time at conferences. And I have yet to see any unanimity on this. I believe the PR function should own it, and has the opportunity to own it because they are the story tellers. They are the relationship experts and these really are about relationships.

That said, in most companies it is falling under the aegis of marketing. For some reason PR people seem to be kind of timid about this whole thing and marketers are more aggressive about seizing the initiative.

But it does not work without C-suit support. In order to really make this work you have to expose voices within the organization. You cannot delegate this to a small group of people and say “you be in charge of social media.”  You have to empower people who are at the product management level, at the engineering level, at the customer service level. They have to be empowered to speak for the company. Giving this all to marketing is not a very effective tactic because they can’t enforce that engagement. So I think it works best when people at the very high levels of the company buy into it.

In the In:fleuncia Digital Podcast, Paul Gillin goes deeper into questions like what social media is -and isn’t-, how it is and should be measured, what the differences between Canadian and Americans –and the rest of the world- in their approaches to social media are and his how he’s turning the creation of his next book into a social media experience.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:59 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 2:54 PM EDT

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It may be the new car syndrome –you know the phenomenon that happens when you buy a new car and suddenly you seem to spot the same model at every intersection on the road- but every where  I look in the Canadian marketing communications space these days seems to underscore the need for the kind of media and forum that we’re aiming to create with In:fluencia Digital.

As I say, I may be simply finding what I’m looking for, but the constant subtexts at the two significant Toronto conferences I attended in the past two weeks were the pressing need for more common language and for more leadership on the digital marketing front.

I’m speaking of the first Canadian edition of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit at the start of April and the Canadian Media Director’s Council’s annual daylong conference on the 8th, this year themed “What a wonderful world: The Digital Reality.”  You could say that these are events came at the question from almost opposite ends of the interactive divide.

CMDC conference co-chair, and Cossette media director, Cathy Collier crystallized things for me in her opening comments on Tuesday when she described the digital marketing world as being populated by “natives” and “immigrants.” The “natives” are mostly the under 25 set who barely remember a time before the World Wide Web, video gaming as a dominant entertainment form and a cell phone in every back pack. They are fluent in all things digital and are frighteningly adept at multitasking at lightning speeds through the environment. The “immigrants” are generally the over 25 set who are coming later to the party, are slower to figure it out and no matter how hard their try will inevitably speak the lingo with a thick accent, especially the older ones.  They know interactive is the future and want to learn the ways of this new world. And most importantly they are in positions that make the decisions and control spending priorities at marketers, agencies and media companies, and will be for some time.

(While it’s easy to think of Collier speaking primarily about the Boomer set at the very top ranks of business these days, a lot of Gen X folks in their late, mid, and early 30s can also be considered digital “immigrants.” These are people who entered the workforce just before or as e-mail was only coming on stream, and have been steeped in traditional marcom tools and tactics with only a passing involvement with the Web.)

The natives and the immigrants are going to have to come to terms with each other, speak in the same language and work in harmony if the opportunities of the interactive marketing era are to be exploited fully.

The morning CMDC keynote speaker, David Kenny, chair and CEO of Publicis’s interactive agency network Digitas carried that theme forward. He likened learning the digital marketing world to learning French-something he had to do in order to better communicate with his Paris-based bosses. His advice to learning French:  start by reading childrens’ books. Don’t be afraid to go to the basics and learn from the ground up. (Of course, he acknowledged learning a new language –either French or digital- is a lot easier said when you’re 14 rather than a successful executive at the top of your game in mid-career.)

Kenny predicted that the question of which kind of agency should be leading interactive marketing efforts will soon be moot. The distinction between digital and traditional agencies will disappear, and it will again simply be agencies. That said, he argued that the disciplines that underpin media agencies position them to take the lead in the interactive space and urged them to do so.

Digital marketing is all about “media creativity, media distribution and media optimization,” Kenny said. “It’s not that complex if you let the consumer be your guide. And she will … if you listen.”

The freewheeling afternoon CMDC panel of client and agency (including media, creative, and several flavours of digital) stakeholders led by Taxi Canada’s Rob Guenette also dealt with a lot of the same questions of how to bring digital fully into the marketing mix-and who should be taking the lead in doing that.

 Of course, -after the unanimous lip service that the consumer is the one calling the shots-, there was no big answer on the later question. There probably won’t ever be. But for sure everyone agrees the silos have to come down, both within companies and between their agency partners.

The primary constituency at the eMetrics event, of course, was the pure lain “natives” of the interactive world: the metrics and analytics people who are the front lines of making online work. Many of them take pride in being called geeks and nerds.

A surprising –to me anyway- number of the presentations and conversations at eMetrics dealt with how to better communicate the complex and often confusing –not to mention voluminous- data that Web sites and all e-initiatives can generate to the “immigrant” bosses and clients in terms and forms that they can understand. And that they can act upon.

Interestingly enough, the question of who gets to “lead” the whole enchilada of marketing communications in the digital era didn’t come up that much at the eMetrics sessions. That might be because there were proportionately more client people and proportionally fewer agencies of any flavor attending. It also seemed like the eMetrics natives are more preoccupied at this stage with just making sure they are at the table and understood.

Or it may be that they’re just quietly confident that their discipline will inevitably conquer the rest of the world.

Now that I think of it, eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit founder Jim Sterne made a point of stressing that his conference series is  about total “marketing optimization” not just Web site or digital marketing optimization.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:01 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 1:12 PM EDT

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The beagle has the most developed sense of smell of all canines. While that makes them a great hunting dog, it also contributes to the breed’s reputation for having a notoriously short attention span.

Humans are a lot like beagles when it comes to Web searches, says Bryan Eisenberg. But most Web sites lose the vast majority of the audience sniffing them out within the first three clicks, all because they don’t do enough of to keep things simple and obvious so that the scent trail for customers stays hot.

Eisenberg is the co-founder and CPO (chief persuasion officer) of the Brooklyn, NY-based Bryan interactive marketing optimization firm Future Now, Inc. and noted blogger (GrokDotCom) and co-author, with his brother and business partner Jeffery, of several analytics books ( Call to Action, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark). He presented advice and tips on how to keep the Website hunt for visitors alive longer during the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto April 2.

When on the hunt for something online, people tend to click forward until they find what they want or they “lose the scent” of the key word or phrase they are searching. Then they usually click back to where they started from. This lose of “persuasive momentum” is dramatic, Eisenberg says.

Future Now research shows that the drop off after the first click on an ecommerce site averages 10%. The drop off after the second page is a stunning 55%. After the third click drop off rates fall to a mere 17%, although that still leaves less than 20% of the visitors that initially caught a whiff of something they wanted left after just three clicks.

That’s just leaving money on the table, Eisenberg says. He cited a 2006 Forrester study that showed 67% of Americans have visited Web sites with the intention of buying something but were not converted to actually making a purchase. Only 26% of those survived could cite a single satisfactory online shopping experience.

Indeed, despite increasing attention to and sophistication with online marketing and tactics, conversion rates are in decline, Eisenberg notes. In 2002, the average conversion rate was 3.2%. In 2005, it was 2.5%.

What are missing on most sites are “intuitive” and “persuasive” paths for users, he says. “Great experiences aren’t accidents.”

Building better e-commerce experiences doesn’t have to involve expansive site overhauls. Often it’s the small changes that make the biggest difference, be they changing a colour scheme or adding a prominent graphic -or even some keywords- that ensures greater consistency of a home or landing page with the advertising or keywords that brought the visitor to the page in the first place.

Eisenberg‘s $25 million example of this in action is overstock.com, a site dedicated to selling discounted clearance items of all sorts. Future Now was asked to advise the site’s owners on how to increase conversion rates and reduce high levels of visitor abandonment in its books, movies and CD section. Eisenberg and company determined that the “search any title” tool was too close to a small banner promoting deals on children’s books. The proximity of the two elements would cause many visitors to assume the search tool was for children’s books only. In that moment they’d lose the scent.  Simply by moving the two things further apart and tweaking the search tool text to make it clearer that every title in the site could be found using it, user abandonment from the site fell 33%. That meant an immediate increase in sales of $70,000 per day, or $25 million over the course of a year.

“You can optimize all you like,” Eisenberg, but the real improvements in ecommerce usually come from adapting to the natural impulses of your consumers. “It’s about the people, not the technology.”

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 4:08 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 4:17 PM EDT

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No, that’s not advocating muttering under your breath or even swearing out loud at them. Rather it’s the acronym from Forrester Research Web marketing manager  Corey Mathews for a simple strategy for data and analytic people to get the right information to decision makers in formats they can use: DARN IT - Define, Automate, Report, Nudge, Iterate.

“Your managers aren’t stupid, they’re just busy,” said Mathews during his presentation to the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto at the beginning of April.

“We’re the experts in understanding the data. The issue is reporting to management in ways they can understand,” he says. “Executives need information in ways they understand and that they can make decisions on.”

Prior to presenting, Mathews informally surveyed analytics heads in 42 organizations around the world on their reporting methods and issues. Precisely what is reported, and the formats and frequency of reporting, may differ, he says. But the challenge of effectively sharing the right data with the right people is a “common frustration” in most organizations-even the enlightened Web-based businesses.

Information needs to be presented “carefully, repeatedly and patiently,” says Mathews, and always with an eye to what’s most important to managers and the organization-and in terms they are comfortable with. And that inevitably includes making sure you report on “the money,” especially ROI.

Define

Since what’s most important does and should vary from organization to organization, “defining” what success for the enterprise is and how those goals are measured is the first step in any communications strategy.

The primary data that is reported should speak directly to the organizations’ over-all business goals.

Automate

Metrics and research people often find themselves answering the same questions from different managers over and over, or being asked to do up special reports drilling into data that’s of special interest to one group of stakeholders, often on extremely short notice. And in every organization there are always a few managers who like to be able to dig into data themselves when they want it.

Where possible, automatically generated data streams and reports on FAQs or regularly asked questions should be created. This might be a dashboard with real time stats on sales or conversation rates, or it could be an e-mail with weekly or monthly updates on key stats.

This allows users to access data on their own, and frees up analytics people from constantly getting pulled off projects to do unscheduled updates and reports.

Report

It’s what it should be all about, but a remarkable number of organizations don’t have a thought-out plan for reporting Web data. Figure out a plan and schedule for who needs to see which reports and how often.

Not every report needs a formal face to face encounter, but there should be some of those planned, whether monthly, quarterly or annually (or weekly).

The presentation of content should be simple and clean, says Mathews. Live by Edward Tufte’s law of now more than six points per Power Point slide. Keep data tables as simple as possible; four columns by four rows are optimal.

Make the data easier to process by varying the shape of boxes, colour or even point size of the key numbers that should jump out.

Nudge

“Don’t just throw data at executives, give them actual recommendations,” Mathews urges. “Robots can pull numbers. You add value when you interpret and act on analytics.”

Presenting and assessing multiple options is good, just not too many or too few. A “lack of context” for information can often lead to misinterpretation of data and errors, Matthews says.

Iterate

Or as Mathews rephrases it, “keep throwing spaghetti at the wall.”

“It’s a conversation, not a lecture,” he says, so you need to keep repeating the key recommendations, with the renewed data to support it, on an ongoing basis. “Iterate, iterate, iterate.”

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 9:16 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 4:15 PM EDT

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Data measuring Web and other online marketing activities are inevitably wrong.

That’s not likely a message one would expect from the chair of the Web Analytics Association and founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit conference series. But that was a key insight that Jim Sterne delivered in his opening keynote address at the first Toronto edition of the eMetrics event in Toronto April 1.

Not that Sterne, a Santa Barbara-based consultant and author of six books on Internet marketing, was advocating ignoring data or not even bothering to collect it. Far from it. His main point is that the specific numbers measured in anything are almost beside the point. The real actionable learning is always in how the numbers are trending, or changing over time. And getting hung up, for example, over what impact cookie deletion might have on the “true” precise numbers obscures the utility of having a proper web metrics and analytics program.

Marketing optimization is all about making Web sites better and using what you learn online to impact the entire enterprise, Stern said. Companies and organizations should think of Web sites as being like giant radio telescopes pulling in a vast universe of consumer and customer data, he said.

 There is an almost unlimited amount of data on customer interactions and experiences with Web sites. They key is figuring out what is the most important data sets for your particular needs. And to get to that point, you need a good answer to the question: what exactly are you trying to do with your Web site.

For example, duration, or time spent on a site, can be good or bad depending on what you are trying to do. Your goal may be to have people spend lengthy periods of time with a site’s content if you are offering an information gathering or entertainment experience. But you may, instead, have a site that gives the customer instant gratification. If the consumer is looking for a 30 second e-commerce experience, a long duration may indicate a serious problem with your navigation. 

“A bad customer experience online can potentially more seriously damage a brand” than just about any other encounter, Sterne insisted. These days people are more forgiving of weak or insulting advertising or a bad retail experience with an undertrained employee than they are with a Web site that fails to meet their expectations.

Their attitude is: “You’ve had years to get ready for me. How bad are you?”

And people’s expectations are high, Sterne said. “Amazon has trained us on what to expect from a Web site.”

But you don’t have to have excessively sophisticated tools and research methodology to make progress online, Sterne said.

“Incremental improvement wins the race,” he said. “Test, measure, test, measure… you keep doing it over and over.

“And get over wanting to be right. Just ask the questions.”

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 9:08 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 9:15 AM EDT

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Procter and Gamble Canada is metaphorically holding its breath as it unleashes a playful new microsite intended to create viral buzz for its staid Scope brand.

The testyoutbreath.ca site, which goes live this week, invites visitors to check their breath by blowing into their computer microphones. An on screen gage rates users’ breath on a scale that goes from “fragrant” to “noxious,” but the action of blowing also causes a guy in an elevator to recoil in a variety of ways –ranging from whimpering, to him imaging a rhino excreting on up to him grabbing a skunk to mask the odor and his head exploding. In all, there are 14 reactions, none of them flattering. At the end of each, an arm holds up a bottle of Scope and users are invited to try again.

The site was developed for P&G by Dentsu Canada, under the direction of the agency’s creative director, Interactive Michael Gramlow.

The aim of the effort, says Alex Glover, P&G brand manager for Scope, is to engage younger consumers with the mouthwash brand in an environment where they are increasingly spending a lot of time. But mainly, Glover admits, it is simply an experiment in viral and word of mouth marketing for P&G. “We’re really excited to explore the online environment and learn form it,” she says. “We hope this site gives us new insights, new understanding.”

Dentsu creative catalyst Glen Hunt says the agency and P&G will be closely monitoring traffic parents like unique visitor levels and time spent, and while they do have target levels they expect to meet he and P&G declined to reveal them.

Dentsu and P&G also declined to be specific on the budget for the effort, although Hunt did suggest that the production cost for a site like testyourbreath.ca –which involved film production through Sons & Daughters, and post-production with Crush, both of Toronto- would be in the $200,000 to $400,000 range that is typical of a Canadian-made 30 second commercial.

Hunt notes P&G is being bold on at least a couple of levels with the testyourbreath program. First, it is not doing any traditional advertising to promote the site, instead relying on some inhouse PR and a small blogger relations effort through Toronto’s Glossy Inc. to get the viral ball rolling.

More importantly, Hunt says, P&G is embracing the notion that it has to move beyond the hard sell rational brand utility proposition that has generally typified its mass advertising in the past. In the online environment, Hunt says, messages work best when the selling is subtle and there is an element of interactive engagement.

And finally, Hunt notes that Dentsu is not a P&G roster agency, but when the shop approached the company with the idea for the site it readily agreed to try it out.

“We’re always looking for anew and exciting ways” to reach our consumers, says Lara Banks, P&G Canada’s senior external relations manager. “We work with some core agencies across our brands, but we are really excited about this new medium. So we are open to exploring opportunities as they are presented to us.”

Banks agrees the site needed to avoid forcing itself on consumers, and they think they’ve succeeded in creating something fun that younger consumers online will want to spend time with. “We want this be seeded but truly interactive,” she says. “These people are sitting at their computers all day, and we just want them people to find it, love it and share.”

Glover adds that while testyoutbreath.ca’s content may be a bit edgier than the kind of messages what P&G might have traditionally used in other channels, it is still in keeping with Scope’s positioning. “Scope as a brand has always stood for fun, connecting with people and being very social,” says Glover. “So we don’t think this execution is anywhere removed from the fun brand that we are.”

For now the site is strictly a P&G Canada initiative, but given the nature of viral marketing it could easily travel well beyond the border.

“Being in this new space, we have the opportunity to go global. It just depends on how excited our consumers are and if they want to share,” says Glover. “The possibilities are endless. This is a completely new space for us, and so we’re willing to go down the path that it takes us. It’s like a waterslide.”

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 8:52 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 9:07 AM EDT

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Perhaps the biggest challenge that the online world has brought to the “traditional news media” –and by that I mean mainstream network broadcasters, daily newspapers and major newsweeklies- has been to end their omnipotent role as gatekeepers of information. The handful of senior editors and producers at major media outlets no longer control the information agenda, full stop.

The online revolution has happened so quickly, that this kind of statement seems so self-evidently true as to be the accepted conventional wisdom now. But I think this change is such a radical challenge to the mass media world we’ve lived in for the last 120-130 years, and really such a recent phenomenon, that most of us –especially those of us working in the mainstream media- don’t really “get” what it means. We all say we acknowledge its truth, but we don’t completely comprehend its full implications.

The panel I’m taking part in on Wednesday afternoon at this week’s Canadian Institute’s Media Relations conference in Toronto is centered on the question “How are traditional media outlets adapting to the electronic age?” This is a conference for PR professionals, who are hungry to understand how they should be adapting their pitches to new realities in the newsrooms of the nation.

I’d suggest that, while traditional media are adapting quite a bit, they are probably not adapting anywhere near as quickly as they could or as dramatically. So the more interesting question maybe is “How should traditional media outlets be adapting to the electronic age?” Admittedly, that’s probably beside the point for the audience at the Canadian Institute conference. (That said, maybe the larger message is that PR folks should understand that their jobs, in the electronic age, should be increasingly less “media” relations and more “public” relations. While they probably won’t ever completely exclude media in their communications efforts, PR people will increasingly spend a lot more energy speaking directly to audiences that they ever have.)

Social media thinker and commentator Paul Gillin has written extensively about the way the electronic age has removed the need for mediators and altered how we interact with media and each other. (By the way, Gillin, author most recently of The New Influencers, will be the morning keynote presenter at Éditions Infopresse’s first Toronto Interactive Marketing Conference May 15 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.)

A little while ago I stumbled over one of Gillin’s blog posts from a year ago, titled “Social Media and the Open Enterprise” where he rifled off a host of mind-bending probes on the meaning and implications of the age of unmediated “many-to-many communications”. To give proper credit, this particular post was Gillin’s notes and thoughts arising from a speech by Cluetrain Manifesto co-author David Weinberger. But they really crystallized for me the enormity of the changes that mainstream media are only beginning to contemplate.

Consider some of these things:

• “For the last 100 years, broadcast has dominated our communications and our democracy. Broadcast is now being put in its place. Many-to-many communications will become more important than broadcast.”

• “It’s not about the content. We’re able to get past broadcast because we’re able to escape reality. Broadcast works because it’s constrained by the limitations of reality…You can’t be in two places at the time, so everything has to have its own place. It’s a terrible limitation that the digital world escapes.”

• “In mainstream media, there’s a limited amount of space. So only a few things get to appear and only a few people get to [write]. It’s the same order of information for everyone. Take away those constraints and now everybody can talk. We decide what’s interesting to us.”

• “The authority system is changing. This goes back to the basic assumptions of our culture. The base assumption is that the larger the project, the more control you need. If you want to build something big, you need managers and managers to manage the managers.”

• “Marketing, business and media are all about fake, phony voices. Conversations are open and honest.”

• “Blogs aren’t journalism. They’re blank pieces of paper. The fact that they’ve been judged in the context of journalism is because the media can’t get past itself.”

• “Journalists define their value in terms of their judgment. That has passed into the hands of readers. Since people first began exchanging news articles by e-mail, judgment passed into the hands of users. That’s our front page, what we recommend to each other. The Web is a recommendation engine and it has been since the beginning…”

• “Peer-to-peer is about us making the communication world ours again. Wikipedia is for us. It’s ours. It cares first and foremost about us. Craigslist is ours. People fall in love and get married on Craigslist… YouTube is ours. It enables us to organize content the way that we want to, the way no TV channel ever could. It feels like ours. It exists for us…Google feels like ours. That simple home page feels personal. If marketers saw that home page, they’d want to throw all kinds of ads around it.”

It all rings true.

But how are mainstream media companies to respond to this kind of challenge? Maybe they can’t. Maybe they shouldn’t. Or rather, maybe they shouldn’t worry about completely upending how they do everything. Not that they should do nothing.

I’m sure the reality will be mass and one-to-one “social” media will co-exist side by side. But it is the traditional media that will have to adapt to the new realities, and come to terms with its frankly lowered stature in the information food chain.

On a more concrete level, Michael Hirschorn, the U.S. magazine editor turned TV executive (he’s the head of Viacom’s VH1, where’s he’s unleashed a slew of reality-TV concepts) and media pundit, offered some great advice as to what newspapers in particular should be doing in his December Atlantic Monthly column. And that is, in a nutshell, they should stop being so boring and give readers what they want to read.

The approach to developing the newspaper front page has hardly changed since its modern configuration was invented in the 1880s by Joseph Pulitzer. Hirschorn argues that by what they chose to highlight on page one, and with what placement and headline sizes, newspaper editors told us almost subliminally what was important and what we should think about it all. They decided what we needed to know and what was good for us. And since broadcasters, while over time reaching far bigger audiences than newspapers, inevitably took their cues as to what was important from leading newspapers, in effect editors set the agenda for the whole society. (It’s another debate altogether, but editors and producers would invariably argue that their so-called power and influence was vastly overstated, but it was and is real, if far more constrained than is popularly imagined.)

But with the arrival of the Web and the proliferation of online media options, readers didn’t have to chose what paternalistic editors think is most important and best for them to read anymore. And they aren’t. Which more than anything else is at the root of the problem for newspapers and declining readership I think.

Its clear people are still reading lots-perhaps more than ever. And they are reading lots of what the mainstream press produces-just not what editors continue to select for them as being the most significant.
 
Hirschorn put his theory to the test by comparing the front pages of the New York Times, L.A. Times and Washington Post with their top ten most e-mailed stories each day during a week last September. While hardly scientific, the incidental findings speak volumes. In each case, the editors’ page one choices and top ten reader e-mails overlapped less than 25 per cent of the time. But for him, the biggest surprise was that rather than just American Idol updates and other Hollywood fluff, the reader picks were often substantive serious reports buried well back in the papers’ print editions.

Wrote Hirschorn: “What unites the most–e-mailed list (and granted, it’s hard to draw a single thread through stories about parrots, nuns, and Dumpster-diving foodies) is uniqueness. These stories, as they say in marketing, offer a “value add,” something that’s not available on the vaguely Soviet-seeming syndication-fed news pages of AOL, Yahoo, or Google. The real value now lies in non-commodifiable virtues like deep reporting, strong narrative, distinct point of view, and sharp analysis, which even in the blogger era (or especially in the blogger era) is available only piecemeal.”

Hirschorn insisted he wasn’t calling for “all-Brittney all-the-time,” but rather for a less snobby focus on “great reads,” entertainment value and smarter packaging –and marketing- of so called “important” stories so that they loose their spinach (good for you, but boring) factor. As he put it so well: “non-commodifiable virtues.”

He pointed to Rupert Murdoch as now owning perhaps two of the best U.S. properties that currently understand the need to “sex-up” their content: the New York Post and the recently purchased Wall Street Journal. The Post, Hirschorn, has long been a “guilty pleasure” read in New York cognoscenti circles with its “yeasty mix of political outrage, blood-boiling hypocrisy, misbehaving masters of the universe, and hot babes in some sort of peril.”

Likewise, Hirschorn wrote, the WSJ “has been using its front-page news digest to dispense with commodity news for decades, while employing its valuable real estate to pinpoint trends, elevate key personalities, and, with the lighter middle-column stories, reinforce its brand of wry amusement at the capitalist carnival.”

From all that, Hirschorn’s recipe for mainstream media success in the digital age: “A reimagined broadsheet front page could draw from the Post’s id and The Journal’s superego, doing away with the soggy middle of commodity news in favor of a high-low mix of agenda-setting reportage and analysis, strong storytelling on topics not being covered everywhere else, and saucy, knowing takeouts on people the readership actually cares about.”

In the end, rule #1: tell interesting stories well. Never be dull. Sounds strangely like the advice of the old time newspaper guys who taught us journalism 101 back in J-school.

Take Gillin and Hirschorn together, and I’m still not that worried about the long term for professional journalism. People want to choose their sources of information and they want to have lot of them. But they will choose trusted sources and want to hear interesting stories.

 
In this emerging many-to-many online media era those trusted sources and good stories don’t have to be and come from mainstream media companies. They can be, and often, are found at bobsblog.com. But traditional print and broadcast companies by rights should have a huge advantage when it comes to creating content with those qualities.

Now, can it be as profitable for the giant media conglomerates as it was when there was far less competition for time and attention? That’s the billion-dollar question isn’t it.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 4:46 PM EST

Updated: Monday, 18 February 2008 5:10 PM EST

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I've been meaning to post something on this for a while.

Masthead magazine released its list of the 20 most influential Canadian magazines a couple of weeks ago. I took part in the selection process last fall, and posted a few times about my thinking going into it.

Here, as Paul Harvey used to say, is the rest of the story. This press release/news story was posted on the Masthead.ca news feed when the January issue of the mag was issued:

Masthead names Canada’s 20 most influential magazines of all time
MISSISSAUGA, Ont.—Reader’s Digest is Canada’s most influential magazine of all time, according to a list published in the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Masthead magazine. “When the idea of placing American-born Reader’s Digest in the top spot was introduced, we knew we were entering controversial territory,” writes Masthead editor Marco Ursi. “We also knew there was no turning back.”

While noting RD’s high circulation, innovative direct-marketing, and general popularity, the panel gave the magazine the top spot because of its influence on Bill C-58, a 1975 law protecting Canadian magazines from foreign competition. Before C-58, RD and Time Canada were American “split-run” titles sopping up Canadian advertising, leaving the domestic market in disarray. Once the bill passed, however, “RD opted to join the [Canadian] conversation rather than pack up and return south” which “makes it worthy of the top spot.” RD has since become a fully-fledged Canadian title.

The entire list is as follows:

1. Reader’s Digest
2. Chatelaine
3. Maclean’s
4. Saturday Night
5. L’Actualité
6. Weekend
7. Cité Libre
8. Toronto Life
9. Vice
10. Canadian Business
11. Homemakers
12. Canadian Grocer
13. Alberta Report
14. Owl & Chickadee
15. This Magazine
16. The Tamarack Review
17. The Body Politic
18. Grip
19. Flare
20. The Walrus 

The final selections were made by five industry experts: former Quest and Toronto Life managing editor and Ryerson instructor Lynn Cunningham; freelance writer and media columnist David Hayes; former Marketing editor Stan Sutter; former Maclean’s art director and National Magazine Awards chair Donna Braggins; and Masthead publisher and founding editor Doug Bennet. Over 71 magazines were nominated by Masthead readers through an online discussion forum.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 12:24 PM EST

Updated: Thursday, 14 February 2008 12:32 PM EST

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