Archive for October, 2007

“Social marketing” (aka, “conversational marketing”) online means engaging in public conversations with consumers/customers, and responding to questions — and problems. On YourClimbing.com, where we’ve done a number of product giveaway promotions with Joby for its Gorillapod bendable camera tripod, Joby had a chance to demonstrate the proper technique — and aced the test.

Here’s what happened: We’d given away a bunch of Gorillapods as prizes for the site’s “Post of the Week” contest. Recipients had posted a bunch of complimentary comments and reviews of the gadgets. But after having the tripod for a few months, user Woodchuck07’s Gorillapod broke (that’s him in the photo before it got busted) — and he posted a note about it to the site.

I made sure Joby knew about this, and then Joby’s Joel Melamed posted a note on the comment thread offering to replace Woodchuck’s broken tripod with a new one. Melamed also offered an explanation of why some people occasionally have problems (putting a large camera on the small model of the Gorillapod).

I thought this was a brilliant example of a new kind of rapid-response online marketing that increasingly is required of companies these days. People are talking about your company online, and you need to keep tabs on those conversations. When a problem like this pops up, company representatives can step in in an appropriate manner and either explain themselves or rectify the problem.

If Melamed hadn’t stepped in, some damage could have been done to the product’s reputation.

The lesson should be obvious to product and brand companies: Keep tabs on online conversations so you can respond when it makes sense. Sadly, few companies have figured out how important this is. Bravo, Joby!

I was reading an article on NYTimes.com this morning: “Team Turns Unsung Runners Into Elite Marathoners.” Included in the article is a NYT-produced video sidebar. (While I would term it a sidebar to the story, it can stand on its own; someone viewing it who had not read the story would not be confused.)

Take a look and see if you can tell what’s missing from that video. …

…

The answer: embed code!!! There’s no way for anyone to post this video on their own website (other than a simple URL link).

Here we have — from an award-winning newspaper website that clearly is ahead of the curve in many ways — an example of a traditional media company missing a simple opportunity for expanding its reach.

One of my company’s websites is YourRunning.com. I wanted to post this video to share with YourRunning.com readers. Sorry, no can do. This article potentially could be shared on lots of running-related websites and blogs. Ditto, of course, for the many other videos that NYTimes.com produces on other topics.

I guess this is another example of the news industry still not getting on board with the unbundling of media. There is opportunity by allowing bloggers and others to post video on their sites:

1. Potentially large new audience for the content, marketed on your behalf by a volunteer army of bloggers and other website owners
2. New clicks through to your site (including from caption link to accompanying story, in the case above)
3. Opportunity to include short ad in video (monetize off-site video viewing)

I don’t want to paint with too broad of a brush, however. Some news websites do allow embeds. Kudos to WashingtonPost.com, for example; here’s one of its videos that the site does permit sharing of:

I don’t think telling people to link to your videos with a text hyperlink is enough. Allow them to post your video.

My Editor & Publisher Online column this month looks at the mega-trend of companies becoming more “social.” That is, they’re starting to move money away from traditional advertising and into content, services and community. Companies like Nike are figuring out that they can be media companies, too, in additional to being brand companies.

I think there’s an opportunity for media companies to take advantage of this. The alternative is to ignore it and watch traditional online advertising revenues dwindle in the years ahead.

Just checked out the Denver Post’s new MileHighMamas.com niche website/community.

On the plus side: Bravo to the newspaper company for recognizing that there are opportunities in local niches, and moms is one of the no-brainer choices. Bravo also for giving it a non-Post brand name; you don’t see “Denver Post” anywhere on the homepage except in a footer text link at the bottom of the page. A traditional brand can actually be a negative on a site like this, so I think this is a smart move.

I also like the concept of having 7 featured mom bloggers. (Well, one is actually the “token dad.”) As the community grows, they will become quasi-celebrities — and they ensure that the site will have lots of high-quality content (which you don’t always get when you rely heavily on users to contribute content to the site).

One the negative side: It’s not much of a community. Only “web 2.0″ features are forums (that’s hardly even what I’d term web 2.0) and occasional contests, like best Halloween costume photos from users. There are so many more possibilities. It just started, so perhaps that’ll come. But it’s not rocket science to add web 2.0 features, so I’m perplexed why there’s so little community functionality at the start. Where’s the video? Podcasts? Ability to form online local moms groups? Specialized mom calendars with ability to add events? …

And here’s something that made me groan in frustration: The only opportunity to interact with the mom bloggers is to leave a comment on one of their posts. You can’t send them e-mails; you can’t ask a question by filling out a webform. This page features mom blogger profiles, but there’s no way to contact them. (There are links to their personal blogs, and you can find contact forms on some of those.)

What the heck is that about? Sounds like the old newspaper model of the journalists being put on a pedestal and prevented from interacting with the audience.

Ergo, my headline. It’s frustrating to see newspaper companies miss out on the mega-trend of social media. MileHighMamas is a great concept for creating a niche community, but in its early days it’s missing the boat. I’m hoping the site’s editors will open it up more as a conversational community (and I mean more than web 1.0 discussion forums). If not, an opportunity is missed.

Speaking of company founders being open about their problems (re: my previous blog item), check out the blog of Andy Sack, CEO of Judy’s Book, which just announced that it’s laying off its employees and will try to sell the site. (The company had raised $10.5 million, but couldn’t get to a business model that worked.) He’s been remarkably open about the company’s troubles, and has been sharing what he and his team have learned.

Sack is to be commended for his honesty and openness. His blogging about the travails of his company are instructive to other entrepreneurs and make for a great business resource.

Wouldn’t it be great if more CEOs were honest and dropped the typical corporate pretense of “we’re perfect” no matter how bad things may get?!

I did something this afternoon on a couple of my company’s websites that’s probably unusual: I admitted that they’re having a hard time, and asked users of the sites to help out if they’d like to see the sites survive.

Here are the notes: on YourClimbing.com and on YourMTB.com

The short version of our story is that my company’s original model was to be a publisher of social media websites (in other words, sites based on grassroots media and social networking functionality) serving niche adventure and outdoors sports. While the sites have attracted a decent and loyal member base — YourClimbing.com, for example, has 5,000 members and runs at about 100,000 pageviews a month — the growth has not been fast enough for that to be a sustainable advertising-supported business.

So we’ve decided to sell the sites and transition into serving media and brand companies with our social media publishing platform and services. (The sites really needed a strong partner with a big audience to leverage, so an appropriate acquirer can succeed where my small company did not.)

I have mixed feelings about posting these notes. It’s not a comfortable thing to admit your troubles publicly. But, I think there’s much to be gained from bringing in the users of our sites — to tap their ideas (that we may not have thought of) and their collective contacts within the sports that our sites cover. It’ll be really interesting to see if anything comes from this.

Asking for our users’ help fits in well with our larger mission, which has been to involve everyone who uses our sites. They’re not “readers,” they’re truly “users” or “members” who contribute to the conversation and content of the websites. It feels right to involve them.

I’ve found that I use Facebook much more than LinkedIn, these days. I’m not the classic Facebook user who uses the popular social utility primarily for personal reasons; I use it more as a professional tool. But the thing I really like about it, and why it’s better than strictly professional LinkedIn, is that it does mix professional and personal.

An Email Insider column by Bill McCloskey today had a great description of this:

Having used Facebook now for a few weeks, simply seeing people’s pictures has become a great advancement to my face/name-challenged mind. I might actually recognize some of these people at the next trade show I attend. And there is a fascination in keeping in constant touch with every bit of minutiae in your network members’ personal lives. Knowing that powerful, high-ranking colleagues are suffering from insomnia, buying paint at Home Depot, or sitting around bored on a Sunday adds an aspect to business networking that is just missing from sites like Linked-in.”

Nicely said.

I got the e-mail below this morning, apparently from MSNBC.com, asking me to renew the e-mail breaking news alerts I receive from them. Is this for real? I checked the header, thinking maybe it was a crude spammer’s attempt to harvest e-mail addresses, but it sure looks like it is from MSNBC.com. Here’s the text of the e-mail:

Your subscription to the BREAKINGNEWS list is due for renewal. If you wish to remain subscribed to BREAKINGNEWS, please issue the following command to LISTSERV@LISTS.MSNBC.COM at your earliest convenience:

CONFIRM BREAKINGNEWS

You will be automatically removed from the list if you do not send a CONFIRM command within the next 14 days.

PS: In order to facilitate the task, this message has been specially formatted so that you only need to forward it back to
LISTSERV@LISTS.MSNBC.COM to have the command executed. Note that while the formats produced by the forwarding function of most mail packages are supported, replying will seldom work, so make sure to forward and not reply.

If this is for real, I’m shocked that in 2007 a major news organization is using e-mail publishing techniques that hark back to the mid 1990s. I used to run e-mail lists and fondly recall this sort of clunky e-mail admin interface. But it’s antiquated now, replaced by better systems where the user only has to click a customized URL to confirm a subscription like this.

The part about having to forward the message because reply probably won’t work is crazy! … Unless you’re still living in 1995.

The decline of the newspaper industry and its continuing spate of layoffs is bad news for investigative journalism. As publishers cut back operations to deal with ad revenue declines, investigative projects become a luxury. I’ve written before about this problem, and suggested that non-profits and foundations may be one way to save this important watchdog role of the press.

Here’s an example of that scenario beginning to play out. A new non-profit group called Pro Publica is being formed to fund and produce investigative journalism projects, which it will pitch to newspapers and magazines. One of the founders is Paul Steiger, who was top editor of the Wall Street Journal for 16 years.

While non-profit, foundation-funded news may not be the complete answer to the inability of the newspaper industry to sustain an adequate level of watchdog journalism, I do expect that we’ll see more of this. We have to.

Today in Boulder there was a special free day for recycling computer and electronic gear. Normally our recycling center charges for electronic items to be recycled at its Center for Hard-to-Recycle Materials (CHaRM). I’d accumulated a bunch of stuff that needed to be recycled so I headed over to the special-event drop-off center…

No luck! There must’ve been a hundred cars lined up waiting to get in. I came back toward the end to see if the situation improved, but was turned away. One of the recycling reps said that cars started lining up at 7 am for the 8am-1pm period of free recycling, and the long line of cars was non-stop. They ran out of room for stuff in the 4 semi trailers they had lined up for the event.

Apparently, LOTS of people balk at taking electronics to the recycling center and paying to get rid of stuff. That’s why my house was full of old computers, monitors and printers. I tallied up what it would cost to get rid of what I tried to recycle today: $78.

I’m hoping that our local government will look at this situation and figure out how to use more public funds to cover the full cost of recycling electronic equipment. My fear is that many people will look at the cost and just dump stuff in the trash, which is not good.

I won’t do that, but neither will I pay $78. I’ll wait till the next free opportunity.