Are All Content Producers "Internet Slaves"? -- Why Can't We Place A Value of Online Content?

In a compelling op-ed published in the New York Times entitled, "Slaves of the Internet, Unite!" Tim Kreider, an author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of essays and cartoons, makes the case that once artists became known as "content providers," they were "essentially extinct."

The situation for writers is that: 

"People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn’t be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing."

What has lead us to this point?

"Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge." 

It's interesting that this op-ed follows an article from the previous Sunday's New York Times that talked about difficult clients, among the warning signs are “Whenever someone tells me, ‘I dabble in writing myself’ or ‘This just needs some polishing up’ alarm bells start ringing. Why? Someone who ‘dabbles in writing’ thinks they could do a great job themselves and they’ll micromanage you or worse, not pay what you’re worth."

For writers and those PR agencies and departments that hire writers, including companies looking to become thought leaders by regularly publishing fresh content, this question about the value of writing is not going to go away.

A decade or so ago, you could develop a marketing brochure in January and you could use it all year, possibly longer than that. But these days, you can't get away with the same brochure and content throughout the year. You need to regularly refresh and update your blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, LinkedIn group, etc. That means there is a value to producing new content but the point that Kreider and others make is that no one seems willing to pay an appropriate amount for it. After all, blogs, like this one, are designed to give away content while many newspapers and magazines also make their content available for free, whether you're a subscriber or not.

I don't see the situation changing but here are some questions to consider:

• Why does the content-consumer public feel they don't need to pay for the content they're consumer (unless it's on Netflix)?
• There's always going to be someone willing to take a job for "the exposure" so how can established writers compete?
• Companies may be able to afford to give away content but what can artists do to better support themselves -- including the freelancers who find they can no longer afford to write -- which could leave companies scrambling to find new content providers?
• If companies can't point to specific sales generated by the content they produce to entice customers, how can they place a value on that content?
• Can the model of free content be sustainable? Should it?
• Should companies continue to give away their content?
• Aside from page views, how can we provide an estimate of the value of our content?
• How can freelancers and companies alike monetize their content?

That last question may be connected to my last two blog posts, "Why are Pogue, Mossberg & Swisher Leaving the NYT & WSJ?" and "Why Pogue, Mossberg & Swisher Are Leaving the NYT & WSJ, Part II."

Seems like even top reporters (aka "content producers") are looking for new opportunities because they can't make the money the old fashioned way. I don't think this problem is one that affects only writers and artists. It affects not just media companies but any company that produces content.

2012 Trends Report Card, Part VII

Here's Part VII, our final set of grades of how we did with our 2012 predictions.  

Marketing Trends

1.     The press release will not die in 2012.  It did not die, even as some continue to say it will.  Grade: A.

2.     The role of CES will diminish next year. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) continues to be important but SXSW is beginning to eclipse it. Grade: B+.

3.     Social media will play a bigger role in the marketing mix for B2B companies. Based on articles and conversations with prospective clients, we were right about this. Grade: A.

4.     Reporting and metrics will continue to be important for marketing functions. This will be true in 2013, too. Grade: A.

Overall grade: B+/A-.

We'll issue our 2013 trends starting in tomorrow's post.

Birnbach Communications' Top Predictions for 2012, Part 10

Here's our last set of predictions for 2012:

1.     Social media will play a bigger role in the marketing mix for B2B companies. More than eight years and nearly 900 million Facebook users later, B2B businesses will embrace social media, following the lead of B2C companies…though they may not focus on Facebook to reach their customers. B2B companies will recognize the need to generate their own multimedia content, and that there are active and engaged business consumers even for niche sectors. We expect that more B2B companies will consider increasing budgets to make engaging their targets through social media, thought leadership and lead generation their top marketing priorities.

2.     Reporting and metrics will continue to be important for marketing functions. For marketers, analytics will become even more important than ever. Department store owner John Wanamaker is remembered for a quote about metrics: "I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I'm not sure which half." That’s not acceptable anymore. There are so many ways to measure how companies are engaging with their customers and potential customers – that one challenge is to prevent being overwhelmed by metrics and figuring out which ones truly matter to the organization. More than ever, we think clients will be asking and looking for ways to measure ROI.

Thanks for checking out all predictions. Let us know if you agree or disagree with any of them.  At the end of the year, we will issue our annual report card on how we did.

The Reason Social Media Can be Difficult to Sell? It's the Indirect Nature of It, Part III

Guess this could be called Part II 1/2. Or the Need for Benchmarks.

One of the obstacles we're hearing from clients about engaging in social media programs is the lack of metrics.

Paul Gillin, a longtime journalist who has turned himself into a B2B social media guru and has a blog worth reading, was one of the first to point for the need to establish benchmarks -- and has written that several years later, we still lack benchmarks.

Traditional media has several established benchmarks, including circulation and the average time spent reading a magazine or newspaper. While time spent on a page is the basic equivalent to the second metric, it's doesn't provide the same snapshot overall.

In other words, the challenge remains: how can companies determine if they're getting any value from the social media initiatives.

In reading Charlene Li's new book, Open Leadership (disclosure: I received a review copy of the book), I came across another useful quote:

"In the absence of established metrics and benchmarks (for social media) you'll need to create them for yourself."

That's no silver bullet but the point is that companies have to experiment to determine what metrics make the most sense for them. If social media is about engaging with your stakeholders, it is also about the need to test -- and perhaps fail at first -- different approaches to reaching stakeholders.

I know that in the New Normal, getting budget or approval to experiment can be a challenge. Last night I talked with a very smart expert in small businesses, and she expressed concern about social media. But even as social media continues to evolve, it's not a fad that will fade away the way CB Radio did in the '70s.

And I know social media is not the answer for every client or organization. But at the same time, I think organizations should be asking the questions to see how they might benefit from reaching out over a new channel. Once you start doing so, you can start collecting metrics, and start figuring out which ones make sense for you.

Does Social Media Really Pay Off for Big Companies?

As part of the new normal, we're seeing increased need for ROI. That's a challenge with social media because the right metrics may well be different for each company.

In "Turning tweets into sales: Twitter’s allure is tough to translate into dollars, though Dunkin’ Donuts is tracking results," The Boston Business Journal wrote an interesting story that provided some details about how Dunkin' Donuts, Staples and other companies approach social media.

Here are some interesting facts:

• 35 percent or 173 of Fortune 500 companies have active Twitter accounts, according to a recent study about corporate Twitter usage in 2009 from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. The study called company growth on Twitter “explosive.”
• Still, the majority of companies are somewhat clueless about Twitter’s business impact. Corporate Twitter strategies are “all over the map” ranging from hyper-engaged companies skilled at building trust with followers, down to firms that play it safe, sending out lackluster tidbits of information, said Emily Riley, analyst and research director at Cambridge-based Forrester Research Inc.
• Staples Inc. (Nasdaq: SPLS), which has a “Tweet team” of five staffers and has amassed more than 31,000 followers, are passionate about mastering the art of micro blogging. The company started using the site late last year and tweets mainly about deals and customer service. Even at a sophisticated company, figuring out the ROI of social media “is the million dollar question,” said Michelle Ormes, Staples’ director of corporate branding. “Right now...we value the number of our followers and how engaged they are.”
• Business-to-business firms are also placing increased importance on social media and Twitter. Forrester predicts that B-to-B firms will increase spending on social media from a total of $11 million in 2009 to $54 million in 2014.
• Not all companies are convinced that tweeting is a necessity, even ones that believe in social media. Boston-based car-sharing firm Zipcar has some 30,000 fans on Facebook, but does not actively tweet, although company spokeswoman Nancy Scott says the company “listens” on Twitter. Zipcar’s inactive Twitter page has close to 1,000 followers.

Some interesting anecdotes for companies considering how to approach social media in 2010. Ultimately, the decision whether and how to embrace social media still comes down to this: each organization will have to do some experimentation before finding what's right for their brand, goals and capabilities. The need to experiment in social media is a tougher sell in 2010, even with the explosion of users on social media, especially when organizations need to report ROI metrics for all their initiatives.

Metrics from Online Sharing -- the numbers are not high, which is both good and bad news

If you've got a blog or a Twitter feed, or you're an online marketer (including PR), you want to drive traffic to your site, Twitter feed, etc.

And if you're an online marketer, and your client or boss is reluctant, one of the things you need to do is defend the ROI of social media.

And that has not been easy to do.

As I've discussed, each organization brings different skill sets, goals, experience and connections with their target audiences -- so the metrics that matter may be vastly different. My metrics may not be relevant to yours, unlike circulation figures for print magazines, which is an apple-to-apple comparison.

In "Share the Moment and Spread the Wealth: The Big Business of Driving Traffic Back to a Web Site," the New York Times' Brad Stone goes beyond an introductory article on the topic. (The paper of record finds itself often covering the basics so that it can then write deeper articles.)

Stone gets someone to provide hard metrics.

Ok, so Justin.TV disclosed that visitors to its site now share links from the site 6,000 times a day (up from 2,000 per day), now that it uses Meebo. That 200-percent increase translates into 68 percent growth in traffic to the Justin.TV site -- a big drop off, but a much, much better return than direct mail's typical 1-percent response rate.

What's interesting is that the CEO ShareThis reported hard numbers for retweeting. ShareThis provides sharing tools to major sites like FoxNews.com and ESPN.com. According to the Times,

When readers post a link from a ShareThis site onto Twitter, their followers often “retweet” the link to their own Twitter groupies. As a result, 18 Twitter users, on average, click on that link and visit the site. A single link to a story posted on LinkedIn, the professional social network, generates around eight visitors; Digg gets five clicks for every link posted to the site," ShareThis reported.

So, the good news: above are some metrics with which to compare your efforts. You may not be doing as badly as you thought.

The bad news: That's a lot of effort to generated 18 click-throughs, and that's for content from some very professional sites. And perhaps those 18 new visitors can help boost page view and stickiness metrics to tout to advertisers, but it still seems like a long way to go before that gets monetized.

How to Approach Social Media

One reason I think that some people are reluctant to engage social media is that they are concerned about not knowing the rules, not knowing how to allocate resources, and about making mistakes.

Previous blog articles have addressed some of the rules. (Check out: How Many 10 Commandments of Social Media Do You Need?) And others have addressed resource allocation and metrics.

But I haven't really addressed making mistakes. The fact is that everyone's going to make mistakes because social media is about experimenting to figure out what works. And "what works" is likely to be different for each organization (thus the many version of the social media 10 Commandments).

It's also worth reading "Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise." from the New York Times. The key point here is: Revise. While the article focuses on advertising, not PR, the point about looking at metrics and then revising approaches to determine what works is relevant to PR functions, too.

The numbers we're dealing with -- like click-throughs on Twitter -- may not be large numbers. But some argue that a positive mention from a trusted source via Twitter or a blog is worth as much as thousands of media impressions for ads. There are all sorts of things to experiment with, such as tools, services, approaches, etc. And it may take time to figure out the best approach for you.

So stop worrying about mistakes. Think about how you can experiment, gain knowledge and be more effective.

Measuring Tips for Social Media

One of the challenges of social media, one of the reasons clients often have difficulty in being able to pay for social media is the lack of standard metrics. Remember: it's not that organizations don't want to use social media. They often don't know how to justify allocating resources towards social media.

BtoBonline ran a sidebar, "Common metrics for social media" that provides a list of metrics to evaluate. Unlike newspaper circulation or broadcast viewership, there are still no standards of success.

And some of the metrics may not apply to every situation, client or campaign.

But it is at least useful to start.

Measuring Social Media ROI, According to Paul Gillin

Journalist-turned-social-media-guru Paul Gillin provides some good advice for addressing the Holy Grail of social media.

Well, one of the Holy Grails.

The first Holy Grail is the viral video: that cheap-to-produce video that generates millions of downloads.

But the second Holy Grail, and the one with a greater likelihood of success is finding appropriate metrics to measure the impact of a social media program.

In my (old-fashioned-now-recycled-paper) files, I came across an article from 2006 that said social media (then comprised only of blogs and podcasts) was great, but that the big challenge was to measure the impact of a social media program.

Three years later, that still hasn't changed.

The need to measure continues to be the big challenge. Especially for client organizations headed by people who don't think social media is right for them. (And, by the way, I think there are some organizations for whom social media is not the right solution.)

So, back to Gillin's metrics, in "You CAN measure social media ROI." He lists 10 variables and details, but here are the ones I think most important:

• Focus on the business goals and five metrics that matter most.
• Know what works. This isn't always easy, but with experimentation, it can be easier to determine what doesn't work, and go from there.
  

The rest seem like guidelines or recommendations. For example, he says, "It's not just about your site." And he's right: there can be important sites for your company that are not your website. But that's not really a metric.

He also reminds us of what I call Gillin's Law: Successful programs build affinity over one or two years. Ditch the 13-week thinking." That's very important, but more of a guideline than a metric.

So, alas, the quest for this Holy Grail continues.

How connected are PR metrics to genuine business metrics?

That's an interesting question raised by Andrew Smith of Escherman, a communications shop in the UK. Check out his blog, How to guarantee a successful career in PR for $30, which is a review of Avinash Kaushik's book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. Smith has provided a great overview, notwithstanding that the book is available at Amazon for less than $20 (excluding shipping).

Here's his summary about metrics, which I think is especially important in looking at social media/Web 2.0 campaigns:

"While the industry still seems to be floundering around trying to develop an acceptable standard for PR evaluation, the Web analytics industry can now potentially offer the ability to connect PR value to real business outcomes. There is no reason why PR campaigns can’t now be built that can be measured and evaluated in the context of metrics that really matter to a business rather than busted flush approaches like advertising equivalence."

Kaushik also provides the 10/90 rule, which says firms ought to allocate 10% of their budgets for tools and the rest to paying for human beings with analytical skills. The challenge with that, I think, is that there are new tools to monitor the Web 2.0 world, and not all of them are free (as is suggested in the book, I believe). Data collection/monitoring can be hugely expensive or time consuming, which amounts to the same thing: the collection can be the tail that wags the dog; while the analysis is the important/essential part, compiling the data takes the most time.

I see this as getting worse as social networks, blogging, etc. continues to fragment the media and divides the mass audience into many, many smaller groups.

But that's the topic for another blog. I think that PR agencies and their clients should have metrics, and that those metrics need to be determined on a client- or project-basis because of the fragmenting of the audience. But the book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, seems like a good place to start.