On Thursday September 24, CQ-Roll Call Group, the media company formed after The Economist Group completed its acquisition of Congressional Quarterly from Times Publishing Co. in August, announced a restructuring that included the elimination of 44 editorial jobs.
There used to be a time when editors were superstars – their name synonymous with an entire industry, their word irrefutable. Who could have predicated that three letters and their universe would topple this long-standing establishment? The World Wide Web has precipitated a change in the business information landscape, which is not only irreversible but puts in question the very existence of the media industry. As editorial voice gives way to user generated content and peer-to-peer communities, the controlled circulation model of free industry content is becoming increasingly unsustainable financially – en masse editorial staff lay-offs are testament to this new reality. So should you be investing your marketing budget in a dying business model? You can for now, but you really need to start thinking about alternatives. Especially as controlled circulation media owners are ruthlessly compromising their integrity by letting their sponsors and advertisers fill the empty seats of their editorial staff. Free content is now increasingly product-led which – ironically – is only accelerating the decline as their disappointed readers look elsewhere for knowledge.
So is the only reliable knowledge now something that is only available to your target audience on a paid-for, subscription basis? Not necessarily. Companies such as LinkedIn and BrightTALK are changing the knowledge landscape by offering viable and sustainable alternatives to professional audiences and marketers. Importantly, media and business information companies don’t need to die – they just need to reinvent themselves and adapt their business model so their communities don’t abandon their brand. As long as they can deliver engaged audiences, marketing budgets will continue to flow.
So how do I think they can achieve this? By empowering their community to shape content through measurable interactive and rich media experiences and taking a more open approach to their competitive landscape. B2B media must realize that they don’t OWN communities – they own a database of names that are worthless unless they are engaged and responsive. Their survival will depend on cross-fertilization of communities with other brands and competitors. Their key differentiator will be the vibrancy of their community’s conversation.
Looks like the microblogging posse is getting $100 million in new funding from an investment consortium that includes mutual fund company T. Rowe Price Group, equity company Venture Partners and existing backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.
Twitter is now valued at around $1 billion which is 4x its Jan 09 evaluation and it now has 54 million visitors a month, which is a 10x increase on the beginning of the year. Conventional thought justifies the investment in such staggering growth. But hang on…I nearly forgot – what do the revenues look like? Oh, they haven’t figured out a business model yet? Ah well, I’m sure they’ll get there eventually…
ARE WE SERIOUS ABOUT THIS?? This isn’t 1998!!! As much as I love Twitter, professionals and consumers the world over are ‘joining the conversation’ and Twitter STILL hasn’t figured out how to make money (Wikipedia shows projected revenues of $400k and this is their 4th year in business). Just to put this in perspective: LinkedIn – with 43 million registered users, is generating in the region of $75-$100m per year. Last October, one of their VCs projected solid revenue models for the first quarter of this year – that didn’t happen (the closest to a business model we got was a hypothetical e-commerce model in the New York Times in June of this year).
The latest idea is to introduce paid business services which include an “analytics dashboard” to help companies monitor Tweets about their business, or verified corporate Twitter accounts. From a marketing perspective, this makes sense – especially if Twitter can offer integration with CRM and marketing automation systems and make its ‘touches’ part of the marketing scoring process. Still, it’s hardly big leap stuff – clearly Twitter is struggling to find answers, so why not turn to its users? The professional twitterati would be all too willing to share some thoughts on what they would pay for…personally, I struggle to understand why contextual content and advertising services remain unavailable to the marketing community. Twitter has a huge opportunity to generate revenues by facilitating more measurable connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways – let’s hope it figures out how.
It was an animated round table webcast with some of the leading marketing minds making the business case for social media. LaSandra Brill from Cisco, Michael Brito from Intel and Janice Hall from the US Government’s CDC division agreed to be grilled and – although they felt the heat – came out alive. Check out the on-demand here. I’m glad you all enjoyed it – we had over 230 registrants and it was rated 4.8 out of 5.0.
With over 60 questions from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, your e-mails and live questions, the panel was kept on their toes and was made to feel suitably uncomfortable about some grey areas of social media. At some times they were simply speechless: in the last quarter of the discussion, I challenged the panel with ‘social media must get connected to the revenue line to matter’ and there was a long, long pause. Only Janice bit the bullet and jumped in though that doesn’t really count though as she’s with a government entity who doesn’t care about posting a profit.
Some of the best practice insights from the round table:
Start small, formulate a detailed plan which defines what you’re going to measure and how and make sure you have the tools in place to measure success/failure (these will vary depending on which medium you’re using). Find other members in your (marketing) organization who are willing to share the risk and credit.
Ultimately, social media should be a part of everyone’s job – regardless of whether you’re in marketing, sales, customer service, management etc. 5-10% of everyone’s time should be spent on a social media component. To make this happen, management needs to ‘institutionalize’ social media as part of everyone’s ‘must do’ mix.
Think about social media in the context of where it belongs in the marketing mix. It may be premature to look at this as a medium to build pipeline/generate leads. However, it is very powerful as a tool to converse with and listen to your existing community of customers or partners and generate product/thought leadership awareness.
Understand what matters to your boss and the executive team so you can align your metrics and success reporting to focus on what matters to the management team. Maybe even establish ‘what success looks like’ in their eyes before they start considering this as a more widely used tactic and strategy.
Don’t underestimate the cultural and ownership challenges when you think of cross-organizational social media adoption
Challenges remain however – LaSandra’s boss for example isn’t willing to put more financial or human resources behind social media although she has delivered such tremendous results and demonstrated measured success across four clearly defined criteria. Michael thinks that revenues wouldn’t suffer one bit if we pulled the plug on social media tomorrow and Janice is greatly helped along by the fact that the majority of her customers are consumers and her employer is not measured by profit – so 1.4m YouTube viewers for a H1N1 Flu video actually COUNTS. Also, who owns social media in the organization? Everyone? Or is it just the marketing team – and if so, which marketing team? Corporate, product or regional or all? We didn’t get clear answers on all our questions, but what is certain is that social media isn’t going anywhere and it is woven into the conversational fabric of all areas of B2B. We now need to formulate repeatable best practice frameworks and metrics which will give social media a credible seat at the B2B digital marketing table. It would also help if Twitter and the like could figure out how to make money – when you’re looking to make the business case for social media, it doesn’t help that the sectors’ protagonists have barely figured out how to generate revenues themselves.
In the run-up to next week’s round table on ‘making the business case for social media’, I have been getting great questions and feedback from various LinkedIn discussion groups. I look forward to what promises to be a very compelling debate with Intel, Cisco and the US Government’s Center for Disease Control on the grill.
Unlike consumer marketing, B2B allows us to be very precise in reaching targeted audiences through a variety of channels. Yet for many, social media is still a black hole when it comes to 1. profiling the target audience, 2. measuring engagement and 3. tracking ROI (and many more things that I couldn’t be asked to list). And with Web 2.0 communities giving a voice to buyers who can now share their experience and disappointments with their global peers, we’ve got to get on top of this. We know that social media can’t be ignored, but from speaking with my own clients, I know that marketers are not exactly being empowered to make the right decisions on integrating social media into the mix. There’s a lot of fluff and not enough substance – and in B2B, you need hard data to justify any investment: whether it’s time, money or both. So Forrester decided to survey 1,200 business technology buyers and found that they exceed all previous benchmarks for social participation. They also did a little data collecting and audience profiling on the way and are sharing itsy bits of this knowledge for free and even making it user friendly to play around with (browny point to Forrester – but that doesn’t mean they won’t get grilled ).
The tool (see below) helps you design marketing programs that not only capitalize on emerging social behaviors but also fundamentally change the nature of the marketing relationship between B2B buyers and sellers. You can get them to profile your customers in this way, but but there’s a custom price tag with that. Unfortunately, some of the categorizations are cryptic enough to require the underlying report which you can buy for $495. This debate has only started – be sure to join the round table webcast live or on-demand.
What about grilling some of the leading analyst firms on a panel? I’m thinking the heads of marketing at Gartner, Forrester, Burton Group and Frost & Sullivan. Some sizzling questions that come to mind…
- Can expensive analyst firms compete/survive in the new ‘open’ community-led landscape?
- Whose interests are really being represented by analysts?
- Do analyst firms simply bully their way into your marketing budget or is there tangible ROI?
I would probably canvas CXOs, VPs and Directors in search for answers and play their feedback into the live broadcast as part of the gr||||ng. What are your thoughts/questions? E-mail me: vpg at thegrilling.com.
When: 24 September, 2009 live and available on-demand afterwards (register for free below)
LaSandra Brill, Manager, Web & Social Media Marketing at Cisco Michael Brito, Social Media Strategist at Intel Janice R. Nall, Director of the Division of eHealth Marketing at the National Center for Health Marketing, part of the US Government’s CDC Moderator: Val-Pierre Genton, VP of Business Development at BrightTALK
The sceptical marketer
Really? Social Media for Business? I mean, seriously – social media networks haven’t even figured out how to monetize their own communities properly. Social needs some time to grow up before I can trust it. With my budgets being scrutinized, I cannot afford to spend money on anything I cannot track properly…ROI is everything these days – plus, it’s so time-consuming!
The socialite
Are you kidding me?? Dell has earned 2 million USD through @DellOutlet via Twitter referrals. The YouTube/Facebook/MySpace generation is now moving into the board room – they’ve stopped (only) eating pizza and are now buying your products. They’re using social media as the new word of mouth. I would look at standing out from your peers by doing fresh stuff that connects to the bottom line. Social media does.
Management
I don’t care what you do, just make sure it makes us money and aligns with brand. Oh – we will want a quarterly report on everything you’ve spent and how it created tangible and meaningful opportunities…that’s if you want a budget next quarter.
And YOU?
What is your view? What do you want to hear? Tune in, take part in live polls, ask the panel questions in real time on the day or e-mail me now: vpg at thegrilling dotcom
I look forward to your participation – sparks will fly, the business case for social media may or may not be made…
On Thursday September 24, CQ-Roll Call Group, the media company formed after The Economist Group completed its acquisition of Congressional Quarterly from Times Publishing Co. in August, announced a restructuring that included the elimination of 44 editorial jobs.
Looks like the microblogging posse is getting $100 million in new funding from an investment consortium that includes mutual fund company T. Rowe Price Group, equity company Venture Partners and existing backers Spark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners.
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