Web 2.0

This year’s Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles has been shedding light on the significant challenges marketers face as they try to lasso prospects online. By and large, the panelists have been candid about the immaturity of this medium, but have been unified in their belief that traditional advertising is waning, and providing prospects with meaningful online experiences is the cost of entry.

The panelists, most of which carried senior executive titles, provided sound bites that had me in complete agreement. Here is a sample.

During a session entitled: The Web, Social Media and Advertising: Transforming and Disassembling the World of Traditional Media and Communications, Matt Rosenberg, Group Director, Organic said that to be successful, “Brands are immersing themselves in the content experience…you need to let your brand take a backseat.” I absolutely agree, and that is a core strategy at King Fish Media, where our job is to help clients engage with prospects and clients on a far more meaningful level than brand advertising offers.

Recommended contacts who spoke at this panel:

Raquel Krouse, VP Social Media, Interpublic Emerging Media Lab
Matt Rosenberg, Group Director, Organic
Mark Lewis, Strategic Planning Director, DDB San Francisco

The next session, Bridging TV and Broadband: Strategic Relationships – Advertising, Technology and Content, took the full customer immersion concept to a different level. A senior executive from the Home Shopping Network candidly evaluated her brand, and said that the universal knowledge of her brand allowed for movement into new media platforms (Interactive TV and .TV), saying, “People at the company worried about these platforms, but with the huge brand loyalty, they go wherever the brand goes and build communities there.” We, at King Fish, describe this phenomenon as owning, not renting your own media channel – Private Media.

Recommended contacts from this panel:

Jeff Miller, President and CEO, ICTV
Fred McIntyre, SVP, AOL Video

On a separate note, I hope to never again hear these words as much as I have during the last three days: “paradigm” (thought we were done with that), “frictionless”, “zero sum game”, “net loser” and “value proposition”.

During each of these sessions, I heard frequent confirmation that intent-based vs. interruption-based communications is the most effective means for clients to communicate with their prospects and customers; custom media provides the single strongest venue to effectively achieve success with this effort.

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Starbucks has been getting beaten up this year and faces tough competition from Dunkin Donuts. Even McDonalds is taking a run at them.  One of the ways they chose to respond is a great lesson in listening to your customer and embracing a private custom media channel.  For many companies the knee jerk, old school reaction would have been to launch a “branding” campaign or hire a celebrity pitch person.  Instead Starbucks did something very cool – they launched My Starbucks Idea web site.  The purpose of the site is to ask their loyal customers what they could do to improve the product and service.  I would encourage you to go to the site and read the both the volume and passion of the responses.  The site is powered by salesforce.com and they did a similar site for Dell.  Interesting, Dell and Starbucks have a lot in common – both were innovative companies who used to be the fresh up-and-comers, and once they got too big; they lost touch with what made them great.

I commend both companies for creating a private media channel to have a two way dialog with their customers.  This kind of forum gives customers a place to vent, and make suggestion.  Read through some of them – they are not only thoughtful, but smart.  A lot of companies give lip service to listening to their customer, but how many actually do and act on it?  More than ever, people in the executive suite are isolated from their customers, where they are a long way from their middle class American customers and prospects.  Also, since they only talk to other execs, they get caught in an infinite loop of their own B.S.  How many meetings have you been in where sales and marketing people sit around pitching each other and not taking in outside information?  Happens all the time and the result: the ads we see on TV and in magazines are completely off target.

What I really like about the site is the “Ideas in Action” section where Starbuck employees respond in their own words and tell customers what action they will take based on customer suggestions.  This is powerful because many times when you write to a web site, you get an automated response which is sometimes worse than getting none at all.  I have to admit I have never been a big Starbucks fan – the coffee is too harsh and I can’t stand the ordering process.  It was fun to see that many others feel the way I do.  As a result, they are introducing a “smoother” coffee and talking about an express line for impatient people like me who just want a regular coffee; and don’t want to stand behind a line of people ordering complicated permutations of coffee beans, milk (cow or soy) and odd flavors.

Now, let’s see if they take this process one step further.  They have collected scores of contact names and been given the “permission” to talk to them about Starbucks.  I would suggest starting a real Starbucks private custom media channel to their customers using content marketing to further strengthen the bond between them and their customers.  This approach could get Starbucks back on track and make the brand fresh again.  Meanwhile, I can’t wait for the first express line open. 

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We often talk about Private Media in terms of for-profit corporations directly talking to customers and prospects by owning their media channel rather than renting time and space from large media companies. One of the many benefits of the private media approach is that the owner of the media channel gets to control the message – both the content and distribution.

We now see a rapidly growing movement where individuals are also creating private media channels – pretty easy with today’s Web 2.0 technologies. Between social networking sites and video sharing, anyone can create a private media channel with minimal effort.  All of the Presidential candidates are well down this road, and almost every rock star, actor and athlete worth their salt has their own Web site, myspace page, and has posted videos on YouTube for an interactive dialog with fans. While the primary motivation is promotion, it can also be used to communicate directly with fans, enabling the personality to control the message and environment while getting their message out there as fast as possible. One of the key rules of crisis management is getting the word out quickly and framing the conversation.

How many times on TV have we seen someone yell at their lackeys in anger, saying: “the press will have a field day”. (By the way, a field day is an opportunity for unrestrained activity, not a day of sports competition at school – thanks Encarta.) In the past, celebrities and companies were dependent on their PR machines pitching and spinning stories to the press and having no input as the press edits and positions the story. Once a negative story gets into the 24/7 news cycle it is well out of your hands, and indeed a field day ensues.

We are now seeing famous people taking their message directly to the people. When Rosie O’Donnell was battling ABC and Barbra Walters over her job on the View, she posted video blogs on her site for her fans and the media to pick up and replay. Rosie’s private media channel told her side of the story quicker than the Disney/ABC PR team could tell theirs. Baseball’s Roger Clemens did the same thing when responding to reports he used steroids. After a few days of silence he posted a video on his site and on YouTube to deny the allegations. He will appear on 60 Minutes this weekend, but he has already gotten his message directly to the public bypassing the 60 Minutes film editing room.

The newest private media channel took me by surprise – The British Royal Family has premiered their own royal channel on YouTube. This is where they posted the Queen’s annual Christmas message and other clips and archive footage. When one of the oldest and most traditional intuitions in the world embraces private media, it is clearly an idea whose time has come.

Consumers of media and information need to watch these videos with an attitude of buyer beware. This is an unfiltered message, which does not have the benefit of a journalistic screen – no fact checking or follow up questions.  On the other hand, there also no agenda or bias from the journalist or media company. This is especially attractive to polarizing and controversial figures such as Queen Elizabeth II and Roger Clemens. It bears watching how this trend will develop – as we can assume that more and more notable people and companies create their own private media channels.

How will the traditional media companies adapt? Will consumers put as much faith in messages directly from the sources, rather than through journalists? My guess is that we will come to expect the direct message from our actors, singers, athletes, politicians and corporations. It will be incumbent on corporations and others using private media to keep the content benefit-oriented and information rich when speaking to their customers and prospects rather than a sales pitch. With the right content, a private media channel can be more powerful than any ad or PR effort will ever be.
 

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There was a report out of Gartner late last month that estimated between 46 percent and 83 percent of Internet browsers/visitors/whatever-you-want-to-call them now engage with “consumer-generated content” at least once per month.

Gartner’s definition of this content includes blogs, podcasts and wikis as well as all manner of rating systems, recommendations and user reviews.

Not surprisingly, teenagers were more likely to engage with these sorts of media. Moreover, the percentage of U.S. adults who engage in this type of content at least once a week was lower than their counterparts in either France or the United Kingdom. Gartner suggests that this may be due to the novelty factor abroad.

Separate, but similar, research from In-Stat earlier this year likewise points to an impending explosion of worldwide revenue from what it calls “user-generated content,” most notably videos you’d find on YouTube. Last year, it figures $80 million in revenue was attributable to this stuff. By 2011, however, it predicts sales of around $1.6 billion.

For creative types like myself, the sorts of people that the business side increasingly consider as just so much overhead, these numbers are both scary and scintillating.

I don’t know of any journalist, no matter whether their work takes the form of a lengthy feature article, a video dispatch, an opinion column or a review, who doesn’t love hearing from someone who is reading or watching what they have to say.

I’ve had people walk up to me in airports to take issue with something I wrote, which is a little scary from a privacy standpoint. But from a professional level, it’s a thrill. “Hey,” I think, “THEY READ ME. They care.” Because, after all, most journalists get into the profession in order to touch people, in order to share information. In the world of print, our words mostly went into this void. Lots of guesswork went on. Focus groups were conducted.

Online, of course, everything has changed. I receive daily statistics for the green technology blog (“GreenTech Pastures”) I write on ZDNet. In an instant, I can see how many people are reading about certain topics; which strike a chord and which fall flat. The rating and comment system, meanwhile, tells me if I’m doing my job thoroughly enough. Often, I will think of an entirely new subject to write about as a result of a post. Or, I’ll kick myself to do a little more research if I’m missed an angle.

In my past life as the editor of channel news publication CRN, I made more contacts as a result of my editorial columns and video Webcasts than any other activity during my close to 18 years of covering the high-tech distribution channel. Because I had opened myself up in some way, readers felt like they could approach me.

Which brings me back to the real point of this column and the question that publishers love to ask themselves when staring at spreadsheets that detail declining print advertising sales: Is this shift toward user-generated content a long-term phenomenon? Can the voice of our users/readers/visitors replace editorial resources? Can this movement be “monetized” in some way?

The answer to all of these questions, in my opinion, is a qualified “Yes.” But before you go firing all your writers and content creation folks, here are some simple realities.

As Gartner notes, many folks (especially adults) participating in the user-generated media movement aren’t actually creating what we’ve come to accept as “content.” That is, a story, or a video dispatch or a photographic montage. It’s important to remember that “content” in the user-generated media movement can be many things. It can be ratings on stories, feedback dialogues about a product or services, or about the most popular searches on a Web site. The fact is, though, people come to sites for a reason. And SOMEONE needs to be giving them that reason. We currently call those someones “editors” but they’re increasingly taking on the role of community “moderators”—monitoring feedback, analyzing trends and creating more reasons for the dialogue to continue.

Then there’s the whole matter of time. I don’t know about you, but keeping up with my Facebook profile and my LinkedIn Network contacts is very time-consuming. I visit both horribly infrequently, mainly because I have a real-life husband and a real-life hobby (a cappella singing) that takes up plenty of my non-work time. I haven’t even dreamed of setting up a MySpace page yet and my blogs (yes, plural) are challenging to update on a regular basis. Personally, I believe there is bound to be an adjustment.

Full disclosure. I LOVE magazines. I love touching them, looking through them, curling up with them on the couch. That will never change. But I also find the ongoing transition exhilarating. I feel like what I write is a better reflection of the community I’m interacting with; that, in turn, generates more feedback.

I believe that what most people look for in their media experience—an honest voice. And honesty, I believe, is what user-generated content is all about.

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Depending on your perspective and how jaded you are relative to these things, Web 2.0 seems to quickly be on its way to becoming a cliché along the lines of “e-Business”.  Remember e-Business?  Ahhh, good times….but I digress.

Without question Web 2.0 is fundamentally shifting how we understand and engage markets, allowing both consumers and marketers unprecedented access to information about one another.  This transparency, timeliness and fluidity of interaction provide both a massive opportunity and an incredibly complex business challenge.  

Interestingly much of the buzz about all things Web 2.0 is focused on the enabling technologies with less emphasis on how, or if, these technologies and content address a fundamental business or consumer issue.  In some cases many of these technologies do a better job of contributing to the ever growing glut of information than they do providing meaningful tools or resources.  We don’t need more technology or content, we need more time.

So maybe Time 2.0 is a good moniker for the next wave of thinking.  Seems the key question we should be asking ourselves as marketers is “how do our efforts fit within the context of a consumers time?”  In an attention economy, marketing which aspires to provide maximum value in minimal time is marketing that understands and appreciates the realities of everyday life.  Winning the hearts and minds of consumers is largely based on demonstrating an understanding and respect for their beliefs and values.  If we respect the use of time, we can demonstrate we share the same values about the most precious of resources.

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