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April 18, 2014

Marketers Face Humanity’s Biggest Challenge


 
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The stakes may not be life and death, but the job of a marketer is to attempt to do something that has been central to the human drama since the dawn of history. It’s played on a stage as large as World War II and over a family dinner table as a son announces the plan to drop out of college to follow the Grateful Dead without a source of income. And we encounter it every day usually on a smaller emotional scale than these examples.

It’s the attempt to change someone’s mind.

Calendar Pages and Clock

We can trace advertise back to the Latin word adverto, which means to pilot a ship or to turn. In advertising this is the core challenge: to change the course of someone’s thinking.

As a content marketer it can be a sobering question: is your messaging really designed around a plan based on an understanding of human behavior as it relates to winning minds, or is it merely a marketing activity?

Advertising agencies and scholars have done volumes of research to understand just how people’s minds can be changed. One great example is the FCB Grid developed by Richard Vaughn, research director at the agency Foote, Cone & Belding (now known as FCB). It’s based on a consumer’s emotional and rational states and just one of many approaches to the issue. I bring it up merely to point out that numerous serious investigations into behavior and decision-making go back many decades. If you’re a content marketer it wouldn’t hurt to become a mini-expert in the science of how people respond to messages.

Unfortunately, most of the online messages we receive throughout our day are designed and executed as if the problem confronting marketers is an accounting one: the greater the number of messages delivered means more minds are changed. Check, done.

You don’t need a pile of research to know that telling someone to buy a product, adopt a belief or divulge personal information is not an act of persuasion. You can’t just tell someone a marketing message and, voilà, they change. That’s not how it works.

Only after many repetitions of consuming your valuable content will the audience trust it. Notice I wrote valuable? That means real content that a person feels truly added to their understanding of something or entertained them.

Time is On Your Side

Content that affects how people think rests on one critical strategic element: time. I’m not referring to the time it takes to produce video or audio, or the calendar spacing between posts. I’m talking about factoring in the passage of time as a purposeful tool of persuasion. If you don’t include the element of time in your content marketing toolbox, you might as well consider the challenge of winning someone to your point of view nearly impossible. If you’re starting up an audio or video podcast for your company you need to give it at least two years.

The optimum content marketing plan is made in the mold of a media company. It uses an audience-centric approach, defining valuable content as whatever the audience defines as valuable. And the content does not advocate for the maker of the content but rather for the audience. Marketing messages appear outside of the content, never in the content. The goal is to build an audience — a group of recurring readers, listeners or viewers. The strategic piece that makes this happen is time.

One proviso: if your company defines valuable content as content it likes, and if the message in the content advocates for the company, then time won’t help any. The production may look like an interview show or brand journalism but the potential audience will sniff out that it’s an infomercial a mile away. It might be better to simply pay to put your messages in front of someone else’s audience. Let CNBC, Sunset Magazine or whoever has the audience you need to reach deal with making content. Buying an ad might be more expensive upfront, but the ROI will beat out infomercials easily.

But, back to the optimum content marketing plan: it takes advantage of the Internet’s capacity to scale a company’s media output, over time, without spending millions of dollars. This wasn’t and isn’t possible in broadcast media or in print. Suddenly, a company can create an online show about issues in its industry. The costs for a year are less than an ad on network television. And the audience belongs to the company creating the media.

Does this mean companies can be real media companies, creating real publications and shows?

Exactly.

— Jason Lopez

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March 17, 2014

Content Marketing: What’s Wrong with Content-Centric Media Creation


 
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The most crucial content strategy decision a company will make is whether to be content-centric or audience-centric. It determines the size of your audience before you even open a mic or turn on a camera.

Most companies adopt a content-centric model, which is to produce videos, audio shows, or what have you, and then seek an audience for it. No company purposefully tries to leave audience on the table. But the fine point is when a company talks about what it wants to talk about, audience size is inherently limited, generally to people who already embrace the messages. When a company finds out what people want, and talks about that, then the ship can leave the harbor to cast its net for a bigger audience.

Choices - content vs audience centric

Three of the Biggest Reasons Companies Adopt a Content-Centric Media Strategy

Assuming an Audience Behaves the Way Customers Behave

Companies study customer demographics, wants and needs, and employ this data to communicate the features and benefits of a product. These marketing messages aid and influence a buyer to purchase. But it’s a critical mistake to assume those messages are audience magnets and then fashion those messages into media content.

Customer data serves as poor intelligence to understand how to attract viewers and listeners. The reasons a person decides to buy and why they are attracted to content are very different. Massive amounts of audience research, conducted since the 1960s, have shown that audiences are most highly motivated by stories and depictions of people; and far less by ideas and things.

Assuming There Is Nothing to Lose

The rise of the Internet has handed marketers a practically free way to launch messages to the world. So, many content marketing budgets are miniscule. Content marketing is supposed to be cheap. Why spend on audience research and strategy? You make the media and then post it to see if anyone bites. If it only gets 200 views there’s always the next one.

Unfortunately, this misses out on exploiting the time-value of media, which is significant. It’s like renting a home rather than owning. While the content-centric model is cheap, it results in a series of one-off posts and fails to leverage the value of video and audio content over time. With each new piece of media you’re basically starting over to attract an audience.

However, in an audience-centric model the individual pieces of content are like Lego blocks which make up a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The media company strategy is to build a whole offering for an audience.

Assuming an Innate Understanding of What Other People Like

It’s hard to recognize just how much distortion exists in our own tastes. It’s not a big deal in our personal lives, but in terms of business, no media company driving bottom line revenue can financially sustain the failure rate of content created on the basis of personal tastes and hunches. Successful media companies revere what audiences think.

When a company favors the likes and dislikes of its marketers and executives over the audience’s, it risks creating an organizational acceptance of a lack of audience building which comes with a content-centric approach. The culture insulates itself from a professional practice of self testing and scrutiny because the company likes the media it produces even if the audience doesn’t.

 A Company’s Media Is a Product Just Like the Other Products It Makes

To put it in a series of unemotional factual statements, a media presentation, regardless of what it’s about, is a product. That product is composed of scripts, stories, transitions, editing, narration, personalities, intros, outros, music, etc.  It will either be a good product or a bad product. The producers will either make that judgment based on their opinion, or on the opinion of the intended customers. If they consistently rely on their own opinion they will attract fewer customers. If they use their customers’ opinion they will get more customers.

Steve Jobs once replied to a contentious question during a stage presentation, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.”

— Jason Lopez

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February 20, 2014

Content Marketing: Instilling An Audience-Centric Culture


 
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Conte the movie

Creating media and posting it on the web is easy. Creating media to attract and hold someone’s attention is difficult.

It starts with knowing what people want. We know what people want, right? We know good content when we see it. If we like it then other people will, too.

Well, no.

Figure Out What Makes Them Dance

Leo Hindery, a legend in the TV business, once told me in an interview about the state of video on the web, “People think they are experts in what a good production is because they watch TV. They are experts. They’re experts in what they like. But they aren’t experts in what I like or you like or anyone else until they ask.”

Hollywood learned a long time ago there is an inherent disconnection between creators and audience – the gut instincts of movie executives and producers to predict box office success weren’t reliable enough. By the time The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind were made in the 1930s, movies were being tested in front of preview audiences. Today, testing and research has become a part of media culture in movie studios, broadcasting, cable, the music industry and even on Broadway.

For movie producers, radio and TV program directors, or music label marketers personal taste is essentially irrelevant. Songs, shows, movies, news programs and such are just product: like cheese, Frisbees or shoes. This is not to suggest media professionals don’t appreciate art. It’s show business. And whatever you are creating, whether it’s an avant-garde production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni or a one minute promo video for a mom & pops web page, if you are making media with the intention of attracting an audience you are in show biz, kid.

Time and again those who’ve learned how to make a living in media, preach being audience-centric (identify audience then make media). Guitarist and music business mentor Tom Hess implores new musicians to forget iconoclastic illusions. He writes that the first thing you need to do is “find and identify the people who you will give value to.” And in a book that explores more than the title suggests, How to DJ Right, Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster assert, “The whole point of DJing is that you interact with the people on the dance floor… your job is to get inside their heads and figure out what makes them dance.”

Dollarphotoclub_23600570 turntable

Can’t Afford Free Anymore

As journalist Tom Foremski observed every company is a media company. At first glance that obviously means any company creating media on the web, in order to be successful, must produce well made content.

Let me take you back where the sausage is made. The primary function of a media company is not to make content. Granted, media companies spend a significant portion of their resources on creation. They hire lots of creative people to produce text, images and sound. But regardless of these activities, without revenue the company would fail. A media company’s raison d’être is to sell an audience’s attention to advertisers or sell the content directly to an audience.

But let’s examine a non-media company like a maker of widgets. It wants to get its widget message out to as many people as possible. So, the company’s marketing department, armed with a shiny new website, makes content about widgets and then seeks people to read, watch or listen to it. This is a content-centric model: make media then find an audience.

There’s no need to sell advertising or charge a fee to the audience, because the company makes its money selling widgets. It finds out what the market needs and then manufactures widgets to fulfill that need. Why should it apply this business model to its media creation? The cost to make it is modest. With direct access to millions of people over the Internet and with a cheap microphone or camera the widget-maker can theoretically upload an unlimited amount of content.

Well, about eight years ago the mere process of making a video and uploading it was a great result in itself. It was free. However, through trial and error many marketers have realized they can’t afford free without an audience. Marketers are moving, some more quickly than others, toward being audience-centric. They eschew making media from their personal tastes or assumptions, but instead identify their target audience and “ask” the audience what it wants before ever turning on a microphone.

The web is full of content-centric media looking for an audience. Most of it is noise. But with a shift to an audience-centric model — i.e., treating content creation like a business — marketers can reach more people with media that’s actually valuable and builds brand awareness. In many organizations the shift from content-centric to audience-centric will require a cultural change, perhaps even a tectonic one.

— Jason Lopez

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February 4, 2014

From On Air to Online: A Social Media Story


 
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Audio gear with icon 3

My foray into writing about and reporting on technology began in 1997 while I was working as a freelance radio reporter in San Francisco. A colleague knew I was looking for additional work and introduced me to a small marketing company in need of someone who could pitch stories to newspaper editors. They were handling a product from a Los Gatos company called SoloPoint.

The device essentially enabled the control of a phone via a personal computer. By today’s standards it was simplistic, but I was fortunate to have a phone call with an industry analyst to get better acquainted with it and learn about the lofty heights the SoloPoint technology road map pointed to. Our conversation drifted from the SoloPoint solution to the future of telephony – a future where cell phones would become mini computers more powerful than PCs at the time.

That experience led to covering technology for commercial news radio, starting a business news operation at KBZS-AM in San Francisco, and reporting for NPR for several years. Concurrently in 2005 my friend Tony Perkins, the founder of Red Herring magazine, had begun to develop his next project called AlwaysOn. I had been thinking of helping him with the online audio and video piece of the website, but Tony realized it might be awhile until it would be built. So, he introduced me to John Furrier who had started a company called Podtech.

John began doing audio interviews and blogging as a way to get noticed in the job market. But he has a keen sense for something that has “it” and realized there was more to online media than just posting interviews. He already had exerted a constructive influence on Mike Arrington’s early development of TechCrunch, and John saw the audio realm as something he could run with. When I joined Podtech at the end of 2005 he was courting venture capitalists to fund the expansion of his many ideas.

Originally I envisioned a platform for freelance journalists to create accounts, upload assets and work on stories. But it was Podtech’s marketing services (called Podtech Pro) for large clients that prospered. From 2006 to 2008 my team, made up of professional broadcast writers and reporters, developed several successful online content strategies for Silicon Valley clients. We were essentially an agency within Podtech while the greater company was tasked with coming up with the next hot Internet thing.

Podtech functioned like a social media laboratory. Robert Scoble seemingly interviewed every player in Silicon Valley and tried every device and app he could get his hands on. Jeremiah Owyang was imagining how social media could help companies work better together. Steve Gillmor as his unapologetic self saw social media’s proper role as gadfly. He created a video, interviewing salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff among others, sprinkled with profanity. Steve showed he knew a lot more about edginess in media than anyone else in the company. Benioff later hired him.

Although Podtech received a lot of flack for some of its less-than-appealing video programs on its network, many of our 3rd party producers were nationally recognized writers and creators. Tom Foremski had been writing from Silicon Valley for the Financial Times when I had been reporting daily for NPR. We had never met in those capacities but at Podtech I heard him say, for the first time, “every company is a media company.” Larry Magid of CBS News radio, whom I had previously bumped into at technology events, began producing at Podtech. And I remember like it was this morning, John Furrier watching a Loren Feldman “1938 Media” commentary and there in the offices of USVP on a beautiful California morning he called Loren to recruit him into the network. I don’t know why it sticks in my mind but perhaps it’s because of the effortlessness in Furrier’s ability to make those connections.

The talent at Podtech was, to use a very overused word these days but appropriate in this case, amazing. On my team: Michael Johnson, a production guru with NPR and a creative genius; Catherine Girardeau, a master storyteller who had been a lead producer at Antenna Audio in the Marin headlands (if you’ve ever used an audio tour in a museum anywhere in the world chances are you’ve heard her work); Paul Lancour, a media wizard from KQED-FM in San Francisco who can do anything in front of or behind the camera; Patrick Haynes, a videographer able to work with any equipment under any conditions and make professional images.

Taken at the RSA Conference in 2007, from front to back: Vera Yu, Catherine Girardeau, Jason Lopez, Patrick Haynes (r) and Michael Johnson (l).

Taken at the RSA Conference in 2007, from front to back: Vera Yu, Catherine Girardeau, Jason Lopez, Patrick Haynes (r) and Michael Johnson (l).

Kevin Edwards, our architect now at Connected Social Media, was on the Podtech software team and central to the platform. He had been the first graduate at NYU to earn dual degrees in film production and computer science, and had been one of the early hires at CNET. There’s a lot of conjecture on the web from web pundits about how social media works and what will happen, but Kevin sees it under the hood from the code to the actual download or page view. He’s like a designer who also rolls up his sleeves and works on the manufacturing floor. A little known fact about him: Kevin once worked for McDonnell Douglas on an assembly crew building passenger jets.

Darold Massaro, Connected Social Media’s President, grew up in Silicon Valley steeped in technology development. His father was a key figure in the creation of the 5.25 inch floppy disk drive at Shugart Associates, and then at Xerox persuaded the company to make an investment in Steve Jobs’ Apple Computer firm. At Podtech Darold was instrumental in establishing some order in the chaos of ideas, helping to clarify what the web was and was not disrupting and what the technology could and couldn’t do. As an example of how far the advances have come, Darold is running Connected Social Media from his boat as he and his family fulfill a life-long dream of sailing around the world.

And I wish I had the space to run down the list of the dozens of other very talented people involved in the serious pursuit of trying to understand the new concepts of social media. At Podtech we looked at media from just about every angle. We investigated just about every idea from audio blogging via phone to automated cloud-based video editing which probably requires artificial intelligence to pull off. John Furrier’s stock phrase was, “fail fast.”

There were numerous creative tensions in such a milieu of practice, theory, and entrepreneurship. In the end, however, creating the next online juggernaut was not to be. The VCs pulled funding, Podtech’s assets were sold, and the second incarnation of the firm failed, but not until a handful of us doing the agency work in Podtech Pro made a commitment to finish client projects without compensation. We wagered that we had developed enough trust with our client project managers they would stick with us on future initiatives. They did and Connected Social Media started business in 2009.

This blog is a collection of insights learned in my years in broadcasting as an on-air host, reporter, program director and station manager; and over the past 8 years immersed in social media in Silicon Valley at Podtech and Connected Social Media. I have more topics than I know what to do with but it’s my hope that I might help anyone who reads this blog and especially help prevent them from reinventing the wheel… or perhaps make an improved version of it.

— Jason Lopez

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