E-venting.net

Dos And Don’ts For Your Next Annual Sales Meeting

A few weeks back I wrote an article for MediaPost entitled "Dos And Don’ts For Your Next Annual Sales Meeting." Have a look at the article on MediaPost for the full text, but here are the 8 tips:

DO's:

• Do kick off with a provocative keynote speaker who can speak to some of the biggest issues in the industry - especially, forward-looking issues.
• Do program the event to include lots of networking. Consumer-generated content exists offline as well; creating a context for dialogue, and letting your salespeople learn from each other, can be highly profitable.
• Do invite partners and vendors to attend, and even exhibit at the event. Giving your sales force firsthand en-masse access to rich media, research, measurement and other partners is expedient to both you and your partners, and gives everyone more depth in your offerings.
• Do budget appropriately for the event. A two-day conference at a major hotel can easily run $500/per person, and is rarely less than $250 per person. In addition to your staff travel expenses, your budget should allocate for everything from venue and food and beverage, to A/V, on-site signage and collateral, shipping, photography or videography, Internet connectivity, gratuities, even speaker honorariums. Sound like a lot? Calculate the cost of taking your sales force off the street for a day or two, and it's easily justified.

DONT's:

• Don't think of the event as having "mandatory attendance." Maybe it does, but if you program it that way, you'll fulfill the event's promise of being an "insipid time suck." Program a show you'd take a day or two out of your schedule to attend yourself.
• Don't limit speakers to your own executives, or even to the sell-side. Round out your agenda with every perspective that might contribute to a more productive and valuable event.
• Don't focus exclusively on sales force education or professional development. An annual sales conference is a powerful way to solidify internal culture while transferring knowledge throughout the organization.
• Don't invite clients. No matter how much work you put into the agenda and the environment, all attention is lost if there's media budget in the room. Make the day about your sales staff, and keep the dialogue with them wide-open.

Very few events are aimed at the sell-side, placing an enormous educational burden on the Annual Sales Meeting. Many of the heads of sales I've spoken with see this project as hazardous duty, or the cost of doing business in a sales organization. Instead, I think it's immensely valuable and a huge opportunity - with the same potential as any other industry event.

Customer Engagement: What Publishers Can Learn from Online Retailers

My last article for MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider is entitled, "Customer Engagement: What Publishers Can Learn from Online Retailers." Click through for the full read on MediaPost's site.

I've got retail on the brain. I often do. One of my clients is Shop.org, whom I am helping program their 2006 Shop.org Annual Summit. (Speaker Submissions close this week - so get to it.) And I come from online retail - I was part of the small team that launched Avon.com's e-commerce business, and was also a Jupiter Analyst for a couple of years, covering online retail.

Online retailers love their metrics. You could probably say that about any successful marketer, but it's especially true in online retail. They're infatuated, obsessed, head-over-heels enamoured with them. Which I love, because I'm a data junkie myself.

In writing the article, I remembered a funny anecdote from a Stats class I took. (Let this serve as further proof of my data-junkitude: that I would regularly find humor in Stats classes.) My professor showed a chart tracing the marriages in Britain under the Church of England. The graph rose steadily up and to the right. The he overlaid a graph of some aspect of the Death Rate in England for the same period. The trend lines completely overlapped.

It's not always this easy to spot a false correlation, but they're certainly out there. Publishers are seeing many of their performance metrics rise, and also seeing their revenue rise, and consequently their stars. But I wonder if some of this data should be looked at from a retailer's perspective, which is what I suggest in the article:

Meaningful engagement is not measured by duration of visit, or pages viewed. Retailers see high metrics here and fear their customers couldn't find what they wanted, then begin immediately scouring their sites for more e-barriers to raze. Publishers, in contrast, exalt: more page views, more inventory, more advertiser revenue next month. But with this many people visiting via search, and many more who visit directly but still in "search mode," publishers can safely assume that much of their audience is mission-driven. If their mission is not accomplished, and accomplished quickly, consumers will seek an alternative, and these metrics may turn out to be a red herring.

However "engagement" will ultimately be defined, it will surely connote a consumer willingness to continue interaction, not a grudging reluctance.

I'd love to see / program a session to this effect for a conference: Metrics Red Herrings, particularly for Online Publishers. Leave comments here or drop me a note if you have ideas on who and/or how.

Welcome to the Next Seller's Market

My article this week for MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider was entitled 'Welcome to the Next Seller's Market.' It's based on observations made at OMMA Hollywood, which make it pretty clear that publishers' stars are on the rise right now. I believe there is more industry interest in what new inventory (particularly video) publishers come up with, than there is in how much advertisers are spending online, and on what. All the conversations skewed in that direction; publishers' sessions were more full than those on creative or search or email or even Web 2.0.

The anecdote at the end of the article, about the diary of an 11 year-old boy in 1946, was found through my fiancee's blog - Bethesda Rookie. Her friend is in Bali, and it's her father's childhood diary (and her blog) I referenced.

If you haven't read the article, don't intend to, but are still mildly curious about what I'm talking about, here's an excerpt:

There are a thousand reasons for this shift in the market equilibrium, and while identifying, vetting and ranking them would be an entertaining and self-congratulatory debate, I'll leave it to someone else. At some point in the past year, online had its Chuck Fruit moment. It had a thousand Chuck Fruit moments. So here we are-- now what do we do to smooth out the valley that will inevitably follow this peak?

So far it looks like we're doing what we did last time:

• Google is raising another couple billion dollars, and joining a VC firm is suddenly fashionable again.
• The press release wars have been joined again (and the battle has expanded into the blogosphere).
• Start-ups (particularly in social media) are leading with their exit strategy once more, aiming more at getting acquired than building a sustainable business.
• We're scheduling, programming, promoting, sponsoring and attending industry events with a fervor not seen since 2000.

None of this is bad, of course (particularly the last bit about events). But as we go down this road again, we have to be mindful--vigilant, even--about remembering previous missteps. Now would be a good time to reread business plans or strategy powerpoints from 2000--not for resurrectible ideas, but retrospective wisdom. They may be the closest things we have to a diary, like this one that I found excerpted on a blog just today.

An 11-year-old boy began this diary in 1946, and revisited his entries almost four years later. "I found this diary and read it. I sure must have been girl crazy," he reflects. I hope we can be as wise about our future as a 15-year-old was about his past.

Audience Engagement, Not Income, Is Mark Of Quality

My article for MediaPost yesterday was published as "Audience Engagement, Not Income, Is Mark Of Quality."

Here's the executive summary:

• I believe that advertisers who seek "engagement" with consumers are going to begin evaluating media in the same way
• Publishers who engage their readers are priming the pump for advertisers - creating conversations for marketers to jump into.
• I'm not talking about having an editor write a blog, or linking to other blogs somewhere within the publication.
• I mean, instead of silo-ing off conversations, publishers should try to integrate them into everything.
• "Audience quality" will cease to be a function of demographics or income or lifestyle, but will instead be visible in the richness of conversations all over a publisher's site

If'n you don't want to read the whole thing, here's an excerpt:

Advertisers are actively working on understanding and measuring engagement. They don't yet know what it is, but they know they're not getting it through TV. They also know that if they're trying to sell minivans, it's no longer enough to put their message in front of a group of people whose demographic/psychographic/behavioral indicators suggest they may be in the market for a minivan. Nor is it enough to simply be surrounded by editorial content about minivans. The best place to engage consumers about a minivan is where they are already engaged. Engage your readers, and you, as a publisher, will engage advertisers as well.

The hard part for me is trying to figure out where social media fits into the cycle. Is social media and interactivity changing consumer behavior (seems unlikely) or are the tools now available for interactivity flourishing because the desire to converse has always been strong, and now can exist everywhere (that feels right).

But I do think that consumer expectations, if not behavior, are changing as a result of social media and interactivity, and much of what else is new to them through online. It's not quite this simple, but I think there's a growing sense of entitlement - that we expect to be treated like people, not customers; that we should be able to find whatever we want to buy, when we want to buy it; that we shouldn't have to watch commercials or view pop-ups; that content should be free, or at least that CDs shouldn't cost $18; that some industry's economic disequilibrium should not be our problem; that Law & Order should always be on.

Marketing to us is hard as nails, which is why W-O-M is taking off. Let us market to each other - then it's our problem.

A Buck a Word

I wrote a column for MediaPost today entitled, 'Compensate Citizen Publishers Like People, not Websites.'  In it I posit a new model for how citizen publishers should be compensated:

• The value of citizen publisher content to advertisers or sponsors should be no less than the value of freelance writing contributions for publishers. The industry standard for freelance writing is $1 per word. Blogs, then, should be valued, on average, at $1 per word.

• The word-count contributing to this value is to include comments on the site. Blogs richer in conversation are considered valuable by all measures, and the writers who stimulate and sustain that conversation should be likewise compensated.

I don't know for certain if this is the right model, or the right benchmark. But I do know that using AdSense or another CPC model to monetize blogs is a gross disservice to much of the rich content out here. It devaluates the whole sum of it. At the very least, writers who ply their craft on a blog should regard their own work as valuable. Are you worth more than $1/word? Good - hold out for it. Maybe a smart advertiser will find you. Maybe a new network will recognize your worth and will be able to convince a smart advertiser for you. Maybe a publisher will pay you like a freelancer, in exchange for syndicating your (unedited) content on its site or its magazine or newspaper, or to simply sponsor your work like an advertiser might.

Maybe you don't want the money and you're writing for another reason. But maybe whatever reason or cause you're writing for would benefit more from $1/word than $.13 per click.

Maybe you'll take down your contextual ads and insist on being treated like a person, not a website. Because that's what is different here. Nobody has a conversation with a website.

Is BlogBurst the New eBay?

My column for MediaPost's Online Publishing Insider today is entitled, "Is BlogBurst the New eBay?"

The answer is No, but you I don't really say so until the end of the article, as that would ruin the surprise. (There's no room for surprises here in the blogosphere's transparency, however, so I can't help spoiling it for you now.)

Here's the gist:
- Syndicating blog content into mainstream pubs is good for some bloggers - particularly those who want to increase their sphere of influence. Many others feel like newspapers are taking advantage of them or not compensating well enough, or whatever. In truth, it doesn't matter much to the newspapers at this stage: the supply of excellent bloggers far exceeds the newspapers' demand for them, and more than enough will step up in order to determine the viability of this initiative.
- So the real boon is to the publishers, who get rich content at little risk.
- The 4 who are participating in the BlogBurst pilot are WPNI, San Francisco Chronicle, The Houston Chronicle, and the San Antonio News-Express. Kudos to them for getting ahead of the learning curve.
- But if they're as smart as I think (hope) they are, they won't choose content to syndicate solely based on its contextual fit with their publishers. They'll realize the influence bloggers wield, and recognize that when they syndicate a bloggers' content, they're syndicating a blogger.
- They have the potential to make allies out of would-be competitors.
- And they can tap the networks of these folks as an audience development initaitive (which they need, and right quick).

Here's an excerpt:

What happens, for example, when the B-list or C-list blogger whose review of "Midwives" at the Roundhouse Theatre in Bethesda ends up on Washingtonpost.com? 1) She does another post on her site announcing her fame to her loyal readers; 2) She emails, IMs and Skypes her (similarly influential) friends with the news as well. Maybe through these two efforts she reaches 20 people; maybe 2000. Chances are some of them don't read The Washington Post, and chances are that they'll at least click through. The Post will not just find new readers in the blogosphere; it will find new fans.

(My fiancee and I saw 'Midwives' at the Round House theatre in Bethesda last night. It was suspenseful, engaging and rewarding.)

Trade Marketing, or Trade-Off Marketing

I wrote an article for MediaPost yesterday entitled Trade Marketing, or Trade-Off Marketing? Here's the executive summary:

• Online Publishers put a ton of resources into trade marketing, but very little into consumer marketing.
• There are a few good reasons for this:
  • 1) Audiences at online publishers have so far grown organically, simply through growth of online users and an increase in their time online.
  • 2) Consolidation after 2001 pared down the competitive landscape, leaving less incentive for publishers to invest forcefully in consumer marketing.
  • 3) Up until just recently, publishers' problems were more of the advertiser demand variety than publisher supply.
• But now there's a landscape shift and online publishers face two immediate threats:
  
  • 1) shortage of premium inventory
  • 2) terabytes of competing content (and millions of competing content creators) in blogs, photo streams, vlogs, podcasts and whatever else consumers and small publishers produce
• I can't draw a parallel between online publishers and magazine publishers because there isn't one - Magazine Publishers have entire departments dedicated to consumer marketing and circulation. Online publishers don't put nearly the same resources into it.
• The MPA has events dedicated to circulation and consumer marketing, but no such events exist for online publishers.
• I conclude with the vague threat that publishers better be aware of this shift and begin to allocate more resources to consumer marketing, and that the industry infrastructure has to rise to support them.

I realized after writing this one that I write articles using the same tone template I used to use as a Jupiter Analyst. We called it then F-U-D, for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. This was 1999-2001. The market was skyrocketing, but at Jupiter we saw our roles in large part to point out imminent change and the impact they would have on organizations. It often comes off as being critical, and after I wrote yesterday I wondered if I'm being unfairly harsh against online publishers. This tone springs from an urge to be contrary - to point out pitfalls when everyone sees opportunity. We did this during the Great Exuberance of 1999-2000. I guess I see the need to do it again now.

I suppose I could balance my writing a bit, and intersperse the occasional accolade (great job on all that video content, guys!). While that's certainly my style as a manager, I don't know that it serves much use to publishers who read my work. And I doubt the editorial staff at MediaPost would find it as interesting, frankly.

I read The Big Moo on a plane yesterday and one of the points that one of the 33 authors made sticks with me. He/She said, "Ignore the critics, but listen to the critcism." The author says that these critics are just trying to make noise and get noticed, to goad somebody into a public debate. Never mind them, but pay attention to what they're actually accusing you of - there may be some truth there that you can learn from, if you can get your ego and defense reflexes out of the way.

So if it helps, ignore me. Maybe I'll be easier to listen to that way.

Word-of-Mouth Marketing for (vs.?) Publishers

My article in today's MediaPost Online Publishing Insider is called Word-of-Mouth Marketing for (vs.?) Publishers.

The gist is that I think marketers are actionably fond of initiatives that will reduce their reliance on media spending - partly because the incessant cry for accountability is almost impossible to silence with advertising metrics, and partly because controlling conversations with clients directly has to be appealing to marketers who have spent much of their careers outsourcing this glory to external ad agencies.

Great minds think alike, and some great minds even think like mine. Here's proof: David Berkowitz observes at the Frost & Sullivan conference today that Fidelity is becoming a Media Company.

Here's a link to the full MediaPost article.

And here are the rest of the articles I've written for the Online Publishing Insider.

Update 2-3-06:
Budweiser has plans to do exactly what I wrote, launching its own broadband video network online and using its Super Bowl spots to promote it.

The Sphere of Influence and the Small Online Publisher

MediaPost published my column in The Online Publishing Insider tonight entitled "The Sphere of Influence and the Small Online Publisher."

I wanted to profile my fiancee in the article, but she wouldn't let me. So I'll do it here because my circulation is smaller than MediaPost's (but my sphere of influence here should, if I'm correct, be higher - meaning that a lot of you will click through to her site.)

We moved to Bethesda, MD from NYC. One of her favorite resources in NYC was CitySearch.com. But CitySearch.com for the DC area is atrocious. (Hello, CitySearch - anybody home?) There are rankings for restaurants, but no evidence that anyone responsible for the rankings has ever visited the restaurants. No descriptions, menus, photographs of the interior - no sign of intelligent life anywhere.

Enter Bethesda Rookie - my fiancee's solution to the CitySearch problem. Read it. Just pick 3 random entries and read them. Now mark your calendar to come back in a month and read again, when the site is chock-a-block with the same rich content and authentic voice. Does CitySearch have a problem? You bet it does.

 

And that's really the point of the article - that an authentic voice unburdened by fiscal pressure creates a competitor large publishers have to be worried about. And with a million of them (us) out there, each after only 50-100 of a big player's massive audience, none of them individually poses a threat. But collectively they're more than a distraction - they're a disruption.

If you don't want to read the full article, here's the executive summary:

• Bloggers (I call them Small Online Publishers in the article, but by and large they are bloggers) do not have the same objectives as large publishers (by these I mean CNET, iVillage, CitySearch, New York Times, etc.)
• They are more interested in having their voice heard than they are in increasing advertising revenues.
• In fact, most of them (us) don't care about revenues at all.
• Yet they're in many cases after the same audience. And they can write whatever they want to attract them. (Or in some cases they're not after ANY particular audience, and by saying anything they want, they END UP attracting them.)
• This makes them Irrational Competitors. They don't play by the same rules, and can't be competed with by the same rules.
• They're (we're) interested in growing our Sphere of Influence. The articles provides a number of metrics to measure this sphere. They're not the most readily available, nor are they always intuitive.
• Por ejemplo, it's easy (and addictive!) to pay attention to where traffic comes in from. But it's more telling to see where traffic is going out to. Seeing what percentage of your visitors you can shuttle off to an external link because you so recommend is a good way to measure how much your audience values your opinion. (This is why the blogosphere, by the way, is as influential as it is - the voices are authentic and trusted, and if a blogger tells its audience to check out Site X or Promotion Y, the audience largely cooperates.)
• I also suggest that Technorati and similar rankings can be a poor proxy for sphere of influence because what they really measure are influence on other bloggers. And for most small publishers, while some of their target audience is in fact bloggers, in most cases they are not part of the target because they are bloggers. Unless you're Steve Rubel or Hugh McLeod, this probably isn't the case.
• I also recommend that all small publishers launch an AdWords campaign and buy up all the keywords with their name and their site's name - Partially to help an audience find you if you're not showing up on natural search, but mostly as a measure of unaided brand awareness.

Believe it or not, nobody searches for 'e-venting.net'. But as soon as someone does, I'll know about it. Even if they don't click through.

To Roll Out RSS, Think Like A Newsletter, Not A Newspaper

Yesterday I published an article in MediaPost entitled To Roll Out RSS, Think Like A Newsletter, Not A Newspaper. It's not about interactive events specifically, but like much of the writing I do for MediaPost, it is about some of the core topics I program into events I'm working on.

The gist of the article is that subscribing to RSS feeds is not likely to cannibalize active browsing. Rather, it's likely to cannibalize e-mail. Why do I believe this?  A few reason:

   1. The inbox is rapidly losing its 'most favored nation' status among consumers.

   b. Most of the content to reach the inbox is NOT news or information - it's marketing. Or worse, it's marketing thinly veiled as news or information.

   iii. RSS formatting allows for excerpts, easier navigation, less burdensome archiving, and no confusion about the 'sender.'

Plainly, it's a better content delivery mousetrap. And from a publisher / marketer / other content creator or provider's standpoint, it's far simpler and far less expensive to implement. In the MediaPost article, I use Seth Godin as an example:

Seth Godin is one of the best known pundits in the blogosphere. In a recent entry in his blog he writes, "This blog has one of the fastest-growing RSS feed lists I know of, but it's still a scary-low percentage of my readership." He then appeals to his readership to subscribe to his RSS feed, and provides explicit, step-by-step instructions--for the second time in three months.

Why does Seth Godin want his readers to subscribe to his feed? Because he doesn't have an e-mail list. The author of Permission Marketing--the e-mail marketer's manifesto--does not have an e-mail list. Like many other authors, entrepreneurs, consultants, pundits and others whose opinions an audience is craving, he can't possibly have the time to write something, then rewrite or edit it for e-mail, manage a distribution list, create multiple versions for various readers and segments, and then answer the hundreds of responses he receives.

The implications for anyone reliant on email could be staggering - Event Producers included. I'm keeping an eye on RSS and actively working on ways to integrate it into the events marketing initiatives I'm involved in. I'll keep you posted.

In the meatime, subscribe to my damn feed, wouldja?