Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

The experts agree: Listening to your customers and engaging them on their level is essential if you want to succeed in today’s marketplace.

On the Internet, anyone can become a media mogul. Unlike traditional media, the set-up costs are practically zero. Of course, gaining an audience is another matter entirely. You need to have something worthwhile to say, say it in an interesting and articulate way and know how to gain attention.

As a result, hardly any new media publishers are making serious money. The exceptions, such as The Huffington Post in the US and Crikey in Australia, have been started by refugees from traditional media. The splintering of audiences caused by the Internet makes it difficult to consolidate eyeballs, and therefore revenue.

However, this media fragmentation has led to the rise of thousands of niche publishers who bring their own personal brand of information to their specific audience.

When it comes to chronicling the development of the Internet, one of the most widely-connected independent publishers is Susan Bratton, whose Personal Life Media ‘empire’ features the weekly podcast “DishyMix: Juicy Interviews with Famous Internet and Media People”.

Susan was a founding member and vice-chairman of the Internet Advertising Bureau and launched online advertising products for companies such as AOL and Excite before starting Personal Life Media. As a result, she has met many of the big thinkers in online marketing and advertising, and she has combined her address book with her engaging interview style to produce content-rich interviews with scores of Internet entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives. DishyMix provides a great helicopter view of new media, where it’s come from, and importantly, where it’s heading.

Though the interviews cover a broad spectrum of new media, most coalesce around four interconnecting themes. Here’s a summary of the latest thinking around those themes, as espoused by DishyMix guests:

1. Search

• Google has become the world’s home page. As a result, search is now a global activity, which creates issues for local and national brands. Channel conflict abounds as head offices compete with branches and manufacturers with their distributors in the search arena.
• John Batelle, a blogger and digital entrepreneur who wrote the definitive best-selling book about Google, The Search, says that Google proudly declares that it is not a media company, but it needs to start thinking like a media company because of the place it now occupies.
• One of those things, like it or not, is the cyclical nature of the media business. After not having had a bad day in 10 years, Google is caught up in the current financial downtown because, if people are buying less stuff, they’re searching for less stuff (following this logic, look for eBay to have a resurgence as people sell all that stuff they can’t afford any more).
• Search engine marketing specialist Danny Sullivan, meanwhile, predicts that search marketers will need to change their strategies to accommodate ‘blended results’ as maps, video and local information are added to search results.
• Search engine optimisation expert Stephan Spencer, who runs Netconcepts, says that link baiting – publishing a definitive story or blog post on a topic that everyone wants to point to – is the simplest way to drive traffic to your brand.
• DishyMix guests agree that SEO people make the best social marketers, because, as Susan describes, they have a sense of “who am I talking to, and how do I elicit a response? What’s a tag that people will jump on?”

2. Social marketing

• Social marketing is more than just posting your latest commercial on YouTube. It is a fundamental move in marketing strategy from interruption and push to invitation and engagement. It is turning a prospect on to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.
• Digital media is not about buying ad space, it is focused on distributing experiences. The key is to create something that pulls people together and gives them something to do.
• Charlene Li from Forrester Research, who helped articulate the Social Media Participation Pyramid, reports that the pyramid is changing shape as more people move from being spectators (at the bottom of the pyramid) to creators (at the top).
• Trying to have a viral marketing show is almost impossible. Viral is not a strategy; it’s a lottery.
• Despite the bad press it received in the wake of the tech stock crash, the first mover advantage is alive and well in social marketing. The General Motors blog, written by the firm’s CEO, enjoyed outstanding press coverage, or as Susan calls it,”tremendous value  in earned media”.
• Peter Shankman, PR entrepreneur and creator of the wildly successful Help a Reporter Out project, says you need to think about who you are and what personas you need to hold online. If you’re a prominent executive, do you publish photos of your holiday on a dude ranch in Montana where people can find them on your Facebook page? And how do you define ‘friends’ on sites such as Facebook and MySpace?
• Stephan Spencer says you should leverage your presence on LinkedIn by using tactics such as including your email address in your name listing, connecting to a LION (LinkedIn Open Networker), and making sure your entry includes links to your blogs, web pages, etc. to increase your own Google rankings.

3. Marketing as conversation – the art of blogging

• The term has been bandied about ever since the publication of the paradigm-shifting book The Cluetrain Manifesto, but what does ‘marketing as a conversation’ really mean? Susan describes this turnaround in marketing activity and power as “going from scheduling media and blasting out to everyone, to consumers, through consumer-generated content, being equal to what we can do as marketers.” Instead of companies with customer databases, customers now have databases of the companies they want to deal with.
• The best way for a company to start a conversation with its market is by blogging. Rohit Barghava from Ogilvy PR, author of Personality Not Included says that a corporate website doesn’t have much personality, but a corporate blog helps you create personality around your brand. A blog  goes beyond authenticity to the personality of your corporation.
• Susan Bratton says a common refrain from her interviewees is that “A corporate blog is the first thing that most companies can and should do to put their toe in the water” of social marketing. The fundamentals of corporate blogging are:
• You need to have one central point which consolidates all your company’s blog activities and shows your tone of voice.
• Make sure more than one person is involved in your corporate blog.
• Establish an editorial calendar, a certain time each week where you commit to updating the blog which is, as Susan puts it, “baked into people’s calendars’- that way you’ll avoid ‘blog fade’”
• Lots of customers use your products in unique ways – get them to blog for you on your site.
• The other side of blogging is monitoring outside blogs in your area of interest. You need to identify bloggers who are popular, respected and writing about your brand because, as e-marketing expert Seth Godin says, “Bloggers are the new gatekeepers”. You need to become familiar with the tools that can help you find this information, such as Google Alerts, Yahoo!’s Site Explorer, Technorati and Trackur.

4. Numbers/ROI

• The great promise of the digital media is that everything can be measured. But what should you be measuring, and what is easy/cost-effective to measure? Rex Briggs, who runs the Marketing Evolution website, argues that ROMO – return on marketing objective – is a more effective measure than ROI in the digital space. ROMO compares a common measure of advertising or sales response across a range of media. Crossmedia surveys and research reports measure the value of the synergistic approach to media. It allows companies to measure ‘uptick’ in total value of a campaign mix that models in interactive. It also includes measurement for intangibles such as engagement, mindshare, not just purchase intent and traditional measures.
• Charlene Li from Forrester relates that her book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies contains a formula that allows you to estimate the value of doing a corporate blog, so you can win over internal stakeholders.
• Sean Cheyney from online insurance broker AccuQuote.com uses the measurement potential of the Internet to take A/B testing to a whole new level, with his use of multivariate testing on landing pages. He claims to use as many as 230 iterations of a landing page – some with only nuanced changes – to determine which ones convert the most good leads.

According to Susan, nearly all of her interview subjects have two things in common: 1) They have no regrets – they don’t look back, they don’t focus on what they’ve done, but on where they’re going; and 2) They all believe in taking risks, that playing it safe doesn’t pay off. Considering the calibre and achievements of the people interviewed on DishyMix, I’d say that’s a good recipe for digital success.

Tags: Blogging, Social Media, susan bratton