E-venting.net

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.

Extended by Popular Demand - Free Consultation Day

Actually, it's more of a current-client commitment. But Free Consultation Day is now tomorrow, March 31. I still have a few spots if anyone else wants to pick my brain on:

• Event Strategy
• Event Marketing
• Speaker Proposals
• Launching a New Event
• Agenda Format and Composition
• Pricing
• Programming Strategy
• ...or anything else I've written about here

E-mail me to coordinate.

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.

March 30 is Free Consultation Day

My calendar on Thursday March 30 is wide open. I'm wrapping up a massive show on March 28th and have some ongoing projects afterwards, but my bandwidth is about to increase by a lot. So I'm designating Thursday March 30th as Free Consultation Day.

You may have a few questions about Free Consultation Day:

You: What is it?
Me: Anybody who wants to schedule half an hour with me can do so, and ask me anything you want - about an event or road show you might be planning, suggestions on which shows to sponsor or exhibit at, feedback on constructing a show P&L, speaker recommendations, programming strategy, tips on pitching a speaker, whatever.

Y: Why are you doing this?
M: I could use a new client or two over the summer and beyond. I figure having a candid conversation with anyone interested in interactive media, marketing and advertising events is a better way of demonstrating value to prospective clients than sending out pitch emails.

Y: How does it work?
M: Send me an email. We schedule a time to talk. We talk. I act like someone on your team, not a consultant trying to scare up business by half-answering questions, or working hard to identify challenges (that naturally I'm equipped to solve) rather than address whatever ones you bring to me. Maybe you'll think I know my stuff and hire me. Maybe if I give you everything I've got in 30 minutes, and not keep curtain #1 closed until you sign a retainer agreement, you'll start to think of me as a prospective partner, not just a hired gun. Is that possibility worth missing the last half of Oprah to me? You bet.

Y: Who the heck are you to do this?
M: I'm no oracle or guru or vigorous self-promoter. I just happen to have some knowledge, experience and perspective that some of you may find profitable. And I'd much rather work with someone who reads this blog and is already in my head a little bit, than pitch some company I've never heard of, who has never heard of me, and end up competing on price instead of value.

Y: Anything else?
M: Yes. Now would be a very good time to forward this to a friend or colleague who might not read this blog or know who I am, but might make an excellent client.

Y: How do I get started again?
M: Drop me a line. Operators are standing by.

UPDATE: Re-scheduled for Friday March 31.

First E-venting.net sponsor?

On Friday of last week I got an email from "The Sprint Ambassador Team" inviting me to join the Ambassador program. What this means is that they're giving me a new Samsung A-920 phone and 6-months of all access service to the Sprint PCS Power Network so I can watch TV and download music and connect my laptop to their high-speed internet and take 1.3 mega pixel pictures and 30-second movies and all the stuff the kids today are doing with their phancy phones. In exchange, all I have to do is give them feedback about the phone and the service, as frequently or infrequently as I choose.

The only indications I have about why they chose me is this:

1. The invite email says, "The Sprint Ambassador Team recently visited E-venting.net and wants to invite you to participate in our Ambassador Program."
2. The email arrived a little after 10am EST on Friday AM.

So something about my blog and that timing are clues. On Thursday evening, MediaPost published my article about Compensating Citizen Publishers, so it's possible that the folks at Sprint saw that and tuned in (especially given that MediaPost's circulation is about 1000x greater than this blog's...).

If that's the case, then maybe adding me to the program is Sprint's way of accepting my proposal and sponsoring this blog. By my calculations then, since the've given me a $300 phone and 6 months of service at about $120 per month, I owe them about 1000 words.

Naturally, I accepted the invitation, but countered with one of my own:
I invited the folks at Sprint to come and speak at OMMA Hollywood about the Ambassador and other programs within the blogosphere. I'll let you know if they take me up on it and, if so, what they say.